jwilzewske: auerbach

Showing posts with label auerbach. Show all posts

Thursday, November 24, 2011

Gogol’s Terminal Psychosis, No Effective Medical Palliative Care in Sight

I n the last stage of his life Gogol is increasingly consumed by a religious mania. He considers his past work a sin and burns the second part of his major novel, ‘Dead Souls’. In the end he refuses to eat. In his final hours he is visited by the fantastic figures from his own works – and they show themselves to be more reasonable than he is himself at this point. Gogol has utterly broken with his previous life and renounces it; now it is avenging itself. … This opera is not so much a biography as a poetic and satirical study of one of the greatest Russian writers, whose emotional life is as mysterious and fascinating as his idiosyncratic works... Lera Auerbach … has found her own voice, and it is full of stylistic freedom and dramatic power.”
— Theater an der Wien opera, program notes, 2011.

T he person must, according to the DSM-IV, have at least two out of five symptoms:

(i) delusions, (ii) hallucinations, (iii) disorganised speech, (iv) grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior, or (v) functional incapacities or negative symptoms (such as alogia, avolition, etc)—for a substantial percentage of a one month period;
Plus, continuous signs of disturbance must continue for at least six months;
Plus, substantial social or occupational dysfunction must be evident;
Required exclusion criteria include substance abuse, mood disorder, and pervasive developmental disorder.

C heck, check, and check—with regard to Nikolai Gogol in the last 6 months of his life.

I f you are expecting in Lera Auerbach’s new opera a Gogolesque, cynical account of human nature, or about the ruling class (‘We are the 99%!’), or a scatology as absurdist art, you will not find it here.

N or will you learn famous Gogol’s concept of the untranslatable Russian word пошлость (‘poshlost’). [Vladimir Nabokov explained this as “posh-lust”, “not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive” (Nabokov 1944, p. 70)—the falsely transcendent.] Пошлость reduces reality to a sort of cavalier mediocrity and unrepentant vulgarity—a moral and spiritual condition from which humankind cannot escape—compulsive smutiness, radical pointlessness, compulsive garish carnival, absurd superfluousness.

N o, in this fantastical new opera we get nonstop existential angst and horror—superbly manifested in Auerbach’s score and libretto, and in an exceptionally fine production by Theater an der Wien (who commissioned the work), with performances by ORF Radiosymphonieorchester, Arnold Schoenberg Chor, Grazer Kapellknaben, and Mozartknabenchor Wien… a convincing reenactment, showing the suffering Gogol, receiving no effective medical help for his end-of-life psychiatric condition.

I t is as though Gogol’s invention, пошлость, ironically haunted him during his final days. Which amounts to a lesson to us all, to be careful about what we dream, what we think, what we dwell upon. As our minds begin to fail late in life, those one-time droll ideas of ours—every hubristic preoccupation; every cynical mental posture we ever indulged—every one of them could become real in our waning days—and we may be powerless to make them stop from bothering us. Bad karma or poetic justice, hunting you down in your own lifetime! Ein Alptraum jagt den nächsten!

B efore writing a note of ‘Gogol,’ composer Lera Auerbach immersed herself in the writer’s complete works and over twenty books written about him. It would take similar efforts to begin to understand this opera: taking us inside the fevered mind of its title character, ‘Gogol’ is less a biographical narrative set to music than a phantasmagorical, psychological investigation. Given a virtuosic staging by director Christine Mielitz, it is also an overwhelming theatrical experience.” — Zwölftöner (Werner Kmetitsch), 17-NOV-2011.

A uerbach regularly collaborates with soloists and ensembles including Hilary Hahn, Vadim Gluzman, Leonidas Kavakos, Julian Rachlin, Philippe Quint, Gautier Capuçon, Alisa Weilerstein, David Finckel, Kim Kashkashian, Tokyo String Quartet, Borromeo Quartet, Artemis String Quartet, Vanbrugh String Quartet, Kremerata Baltica, Camerata Pacifica, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Auerbach was born in the city of Chelyabinsk, adjacent to Siberia. After writing her first opera when she was 12, she moved to the U.S. in 1991 where she studied piano and composition at Juilliard. Her piano studies took her to the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hannover. She was awarded the Hindemith Prize by the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival in Germany, Deutschlandfunk’s Förderpreis, selected as a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, and in 2007 she was selected as a member of the Young Global Leaders forum by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

G ogol’s ‘grotesque’ is a—] means of estranging—a comic hyperbole that unmasks the banality and inhumanity of ambient reality.” — Susanne Fusso, p. 69.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Lera Auerbach: Non cetera desunt (The ‘Rest’ of the Story is Not Missing)

E ach of the piece’s eight short movements also carries a Latin title, taken from Ovid, Horace and others, but the relevance of those is neither obvious nor especially important. (According to her program notes, Auerbach is reluctant on principle to say anything concrete about the music or its subject matter, although she’s perfectly happy to spend many, many paragraphs telling listeners [stories] about her reticence.)”
— Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle, 21-MAR-2009.

A ll theorizing is a form of world-creation and, as such, is ineluctably ‘fictive’. But this does not mean that all modes of imagining tend toward ‘creative possibility’... Fictive forms of thought that efface, negate, and forget their [possibilistic] power in favor of authoritative and, thus, ‘legislative’ and programmatic power.”
— Susan McManus, p. 19.

S ometimes what you want most to hear is a story, well-told. If that is the chamber music craving you are having, you could not do better than to listen to, or play, a piece by Lera Auerbach. The imagery of pianist-poet-composer Lera Auerbach is varied, pluralistic—possessed of multiple ‘facets’ or points of view and simultaneously supportive of two or more of them at a time.

[50-sec clip, Ksenia Nosikova, Lera Auerbach, Images No. 5, ‘Old Photograph from the Grandparent’s Childhood’, 1.6MB MP3]

B ut that doesn’t mean that Auerbach is a ‘relativist’: some facets or perspectives are more valued or legitimate or commendable than others, and Auerbach provides numerous reasons and musical ‘arguments’ setting forth her own feelings and evolving interpretations.

H er music affords the listener or performer considerable ‘latitude’. But she persuades her performers/audience to her point of view by creating a series of imaginative, fictional roles that she invites us to inhabit. Her composing in some ways resembles the storytelling of highly political authors … an Austen; a Dickens; or a Chekhov or a Dostoevsky, say.

I n that connection, political art is, I believe, most efficacious, not when it advances abstract principles, but when it instead alters listeners’ understanding of their own past and future. Is this a feature of Auerbach’s writing? I think so. The composer creates an account of History or of Time itself—ideally, the ‘center’ of (and not merely an ‘ornament’ of) an account of human nature and politics. We hear it—or play it—and recognize the broad, generalized validity and depth of what has been said. ‘Images from Childhood’, for example—or ‘24 Preludes’—are miniatures, but they are not ‘bon bons’.

S o Lera Auerbach’s politics permeate her compositions and performances, seeking not so much to reform our ethics as to reshape our memories. Lera’s work positions narrative in politics, or narrative as a way of doing politics. It insists on a broad connection between political identity and narrative. I do not know whether major figures in the history of political thought—Locke, Hegel, Marx—have a bearing on Lera’s methods or motivations. But Lera argues that each composition rewrites the past in an explicit attempt to direct the future. It is a ‘redemptive’ approach to the past, insofar as it places responsibility on human freedom and action in the present. How do I retrieve my childhood memories of the scary family photo albums, with the ancient sepia-tint monochrome images of early 20th-Century Evanstas and Østensos and Andersons and Thiedes?

S he confronts the epistemological dilemma of what things we can know and how we can know them. Auerbach closely regulates her musical ‘stories’—defining, expanding, reiterating, delineating them, bar-by-bar, phrase-by-phrase. She grants permission to us performers and listeners, but her cues are so numerous as to make the remit kind of superfluous. Her demonstrativeness and transparent intelligibility are something like ... Prokofiev’s?

A nd what about ‘Cetera desunt’ [Latin: ‘the rest is missing’]? This title is maybe an ironic joke? This string quartet is not in any respect ‘incomplete’, nor is the sense it conveys tremendously open-ended.

T here are characters, plots, themes, etc.—and Lera’s ‘vocabulary of affect’ is positively ‘narratorly’ and fastidious throughout. The pacing in this, as in other of her compositions, is characteristically narrative. No, the ‘rest’ is not missing. It is all here—right in your mind; right where Lera put it.

Petersen Quartett, Lera Auerbach, ‘Cetera desunt’

W onderful music to immerse yourself in! Be sure to hear her ‘Cetera desunt’ performed by RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet on Wednesday 01-JUL at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival and Lera’s account of Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’, if you are able to attend.

Saucius ille tamen ‘fer opem. matertera dixit	Wounded, he cries out
‘Autonoe! moveant animos Actaeonis umbrae!’	‘Help, Aunt Autonoe! Save your kin, Actaeon!’
Illa, quis Actaeon, nescit dextramque precantis	But who is this Actaeon? How would she know?
abstulit, Inoo lacerata est altera raptu.	She tears off his right arm, and Ino, enraptured, savages the left.
Non habet infelix, quae matri bracchia tendat,	He has no arms to reach out to his mother, poor sod,
trunca sed ostendens deiectis vulnera membris	but shows her his torso with its missing limbs and cries out
‘Adspice, mater!’	‘Mom, look!’

—Ovid, Metamorphoses Bk 3

Deucalion lacrimis ita Pyrrham adfatur obortis...	Deucalion tearfully perceived the emptiness and desolation...
‘Si sine me tatis erepta fuisses, nunc animus, miseranda foret?’	‘How would you feel had Fate taken you away without me?’
‘Quo sola timorem ferre modo posses?’	‘How would you bear this terror all alone?’

—Ovid, Metamorphoses Bk 1