In memoriam; In space

Wolfgang Rihm: Lichtzwang (In memoriam Paul Celan), Dritte Musik, Gedicht des Malers

DO NOT WORK AHEAD,
do not send out,
stand
inward:
transgrounded by the void,
free of all
prayer,
fine-fugued, according to
Writ’s pre-Script,
not overtakable,
I take you in,
instead of any
rest.

 - The final poem from Paul Celan's Lichtzwang ("Light-duress"), in Paul Joriss's translation, published in 1970

Wolfgang Rihm's Lichtzwang, written during the period 1975-76, is a memorial to the great poet Paul Celan, who drowned himself in the Seine in Paris on April 20, 1970. It's one of the great elegaic works for violin and orchestra, in the same class as Alban Berg's Violin Concerto of 1935, written "To the memory of an angel", Alma and Walter Gropius's daughter Manon, who died of polio at 18. It's encouraging to see a new, and extremely fine, recording of this work, by the young violinist Tanwa Yang, and the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz under Christoph-Mathias Mueller, an indication perhaps that this work is entering the core repertory as the Berg has. I know the most recent recording, also from SWRmusic, on a 2008 Hanssler Classic disc with Janos Yegnesy and the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg under Sylvain Cambreling. Both recordings are sterling.

This really is a most amazing piece, which begins with an angry clash of percussion, but spends most of its time in a yearning, unsettled space that sounds almost neo-Romantic at times. The violin plays mainly in a high register, while the orchestra attempts to pull it down, almost like the cold current of the Seine. One of the defining characteristics of the work is its use of silence; the action stops cold more than a few times, with complete silence before a reboot, almost like black-outs in the theatre. The final silence is shattering. Yang and Mueller have the measure of this music; I found it a profoundly moving performance.

Rihm's Dritte Musik, his third violin concerto, from 1993, also has its contemplative moments, but overall it has a wider range of emotions, and features the instruments of a very large orchestra as much as the solo instrument. Rihm's most recent violin concerto, from 2014, is his Gedicht des Malers (Poem of the Painter).  The painter is Max Beckmann, an important figure in Rihm's music; his earlier works include Versuchung (Hommage à Max Beckmann), from 2008-09, and Der Maler träumt, from the same period, set to Beckmann’s On my Painting. "Music", wrote Rihm, "is indeed maybe painting or architecture, in time, depending on one’s viewpoint. For me rather painting, but certainly in space, not restricted to one and the same surface." In Beckmann's 1921 painting Self Portrait as Clown, the painter holds a violin bow as a kind of analogue for the painter's brush, and it's this conceit that Rihm expounds on in this piece. It's all rather fanciful, but though this is a stereo rather than a surround-sound recording, I can easily imagine this performance taking place in a three-dimensional space, as Rihm says: "in space". What a wonderful album!

Max Beckmann, Self-portrait as a clown, 1921, Von-der-Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal