In August 2014, thanks to a generous grant from Wales Arts International, I was able to visit the Bregenz Festival for Wales Arts Review.
Here's the last of the four pieces which resulted, published in Volume
3, Issue 17.
‘I want to be authentic and I want to communicate.’
In any other art form, such aspirations might be accepted as
customary – even taken for granted – as vital to the creative impulse
for some practitioners. But in post-war Central European ‘classical’
music, they amounted to an act of defiance against the ideological norm;
a determination to stand against the prevailing doctrines of the
‘right’ aesthetic concerns and the ‘right’ ways to compose then
emanating from self-appointed authorities based in Darmstadt, Germany
and, later, at IRCAM in Paris. The speaker of those words, Heinz Karl
‘Nali’ Gruber, known professionally as HK Gruber, is not so much an
iconoclast, however, as simply a composer and musician who wished to go
his own way. Not only has he succeeded in doing so against enormous
pressure, but he has risen to become one of the most singular and
respected composers, conductors and performers in Europe today.
Gruber’s music is renowned for its irrepressible energy and madcap
humour; a distinctly Viennese blend of burlesque cabaret and dance-band
jazz within a rich, post-Stravinskian, post-Bergian world of playful
tonality and dazzling instrumental skill. The music is full of allusions
and references, and is brilliantly wrought – even utilising the odd
serial technique in subtle and surprising ways. But it is neither
pastiche nor wistfully gazing backwards. Nor is it simply fun, for all
its often zany delight and extrovert delivery. For in Gruber’s music,
the grotesque and the surreal are never far away, and a genial,
child-like directness goes hand in hand with a fierce pungency
underlining a real existential terror.
Bregenz Festival’s theme this year of ‘Bittersweet Vienna’ was
entirely apt regarding Gruber’s oeuvre. Part of the irony is that Gruber
has often escaped the attention of his native city, and yet he has
found his own ways to acknowledge and transform the hefty baggage of
musical history and tradition that continues to weigh it down. And so
Bregenz, with its unique vantage point amongst multiple borders on the
shores of Lake Constance, was the perfect place from which to mirror
back to the capital one of its distinguished own.
The Bregenz Festival celebration of Gruber pivoted around the world première of his opera, Tales from the Vienna Woods,
at the lakeside Festspielhaus. But before I saw this significant new
work, there was a chance to remind myself of his unique, satirical style
from an earlier period, with a performance of Gloria von Jaxtberg
(1992-94) at the Landestheater in Bregenz itself; a smaller, more
intimate venue more suited to the chamber scale of the Mahogany Opera
Group, who had brought this high kitsch, high camp production fresh from
its première and tour in the UK.
Wittily translated into English as Gloria – a Pigtale by
Amanda Holden, the performance here combined English song and German
dialogue, which latter greatly entertained the audience with its Wiener
Würstchen gags and added local allusions. Our heroine is a (dumb) blonde
pig-in-a-wig, who falls under the spell of a dastardly butcher, but who
eventually finds true love with Rodrigo, the wild boar who comes to
‘save her bacon’. Director Frederic Wake-Walker piled on the slapstick
with singing hot-dogs, sausage onesies and buckets of pink, tutu glitz,
while trashy Christian evangelism met Kermit the Frog amid nods to ‘50s
Americana – all in deference to Gruber’s superbly jazz-inflected score.
The cast scrambled their way amusingly through the chaos, relishing
every ‘cows at the Mootel’ moment – and Gillian Keith combined a vacuous
grin with a perky voice to make an ideal Gloria. But the hyperactivity
sometimes came at the expense of ensemble cohesion; dramatically and
vocally that is, not instrumentally, as the CHROMA ensemble under
conductor Geoffrey Paterson were consistently alive to Gruber’s biting
precision. On stage, however, the frenetic action, whilst anarchic fun,
barely allowed the complex, sophisticated score or the performers room
to breathe.
Gruber’s music has moments of almost Kagel-like absurdist delicacy
within the oompah, dance-band frame, but these tended to get lost amidst
the mania. His Orwellian parable would also have benefited from a ‘less
is more’ approach; yes, the comedy on the surface of Gloria is
slapstick, but at deeper levels, that morphs into a profounder, more
disturbing evocation of much darker irrationalities. Surely, the final
‘lesson’, that ‘married life is not all it’s cracked up to be’ is hardly
the deepest point being made in the piece, nor the one which we might
ultimately carry from it. But maybe for some – and I’d have been
fascinated to see the response of British audiences – Wake-Walker’s
over-arching slogan ‘the opposite of love is sausage’ worked on some
level to convey those deeper themes.
Music: HK Gruber Libretto: Michael Sturminger after the play by Ödön von Horváth Wiener Symphoniker / Conductor: HK Gruber / Director: Michael
Sturminger / Stage and Costume Design: donmartin supersets / Lighting:
Olaf Winter Cast includes: Ilse Eerens / Daniel Schmutzhard / Jörg
Schneider / Angelika Kirchschlager / Albert Pesendorfer / Anke Vondung /
Anja Silja / Michael Laurenz / Markus Butter
Realism and the absurd might be uncomfortable bed-fellows
ideologically speaking, but that is by no means necessarily true in art –
as the dialogue in Horváth’s play Tales from the Vienna Woods attests. Indeed, as HK Gruber implies,
Horváth brilliantly juxtaposes these apparent poles as two sides of the
same coin in order to reveal the petty – but deadly dangerous – greed,
ignorance and fear which he observed to fuel the lower middle-classes in
1930s suburban Vienna; a phenomenon which continues to resonate across
the uncertain Europe of today.
As it happens, as well as the underlying ‘pig-ignorance’ and lurking extremism, Tales from the Vienna Woods shares certain other themes directly with Gloria
– not least a psychopathic butcher, an exploration of animal tendencies
hidden beneath a civilised veneer, and a critique of various kinds of
appetite. But the work, and Gruber’s achievement, is on an altogether
different scale from the previous piece. He and librettist/director
Michael Sturminger have risen to the challenge of Horváth’s brilliant
play to create an important new opera of great expressive nuance and
tragi-comic depth. The sheer humanity of Gruber’s music and his
sympathetic treatment of the characters despite their shortcomings
enhances Horváth’s theatrical intention to give the story an immensely
powerful emotional, as well as socio-political, impact.
The narrative focuses on a young woman, Marianne – the altogether
marvellous Ilse Eerens; by turn feisty, vulnerable and haunted. Like
Gloria, Marianne is looking for love and is desperate to win freedom
from her repressive milieu. However, she is a far deeper, fuller and
more sympathetic character than our pretty pig and, of course, she is
heading for tragedy when she disobeys her odious, controlling father,
the ‘Fairy King’, and rejects Oskar, a crass, local butcher, on the
verge of their marriage (respectively a commanding Albert Pesendorfer
and Jörg Schneider on wonderfully creepy, lyric tenor form).
Marianne runs off with Alfred; a rootless chancer (sung with
insouciant finesse by Daniel Schmutzhard), whose intoxicating air of
modern liberation soon turns poisonous when he abandons her to bring up
their child alone, and to continue his dalliance with Valerie – an
obnoxious racist, not without human warmth (sensitively performed by
Angelika Kirchschlager). We never get to see Marianne’s son, for he dies
of neglect at the hands of his monstrous Grandmother, Alfred’s mother
(the legendary Anja Silja in somewhat uncertain voice) before he can be
reunited with Marianne and the rest of the family following their
tentative rapprochement. At the final curtain, Oskar carries off the
distraught Marianne in triumph; he has won his prize after all, whilst
she has lost everything.
There have been many versions and adaptations of Tales from the Vienna Woods,
including Maximilian Schell’s iconic 1979 remake of the early ‘60s
Erich Neuberg film. But Gruber is surely the ideal composer to have
turned the play into an opera. Not only is there the Kurt Weill connection,
but, like Horváth in the play, Gruber too has previously fixed Johann
Strauss II with his parodistic glare (see below for a report on his Charivari
for orchestra); a symbol of false Gemütlichkeit in a Vienna continuing
to cling to illusions of bourgeois good fellowship, folky cheer, and an
aristocratic grandeur long-past and never entirely true. It is not for
nothing that Gruber puts Strauss’s zither literally into the hands of
the murderous Grandmother.
But it is the loathsome figure of the visiting student Erich who is
in many ways key to both the opera and the play – he who refers
pompously to Viennese architecture when asked how he finds the city.
Here we have a sinister picture of the future; a Nazi in all but name
(chillingly performed by Michael Laurenz), who worms his way into the
social group with excellent manners and pseudo-artistic sensitivity, but
who is given to outbursts of violent and irrational hatred. It is he
who manifests the latent fascism of the group, with its willingness to
smile for the camera whilst turning a blind eye to the abuse and
sacrifice of Marianne and her son in preservation of the old,
conservative values. Thus we have the juxtaposition and ultimate
conflation of a shiny new modern future with the worst regressive and
aggressive tendencies of the past; a toxic combination familiar from
totalitarian history, and which is perfectly realised in Gruber’s
searingly beautiful and ironically-adept score.
Before this performance, the composer spoke to me about how important Wozzeck was
for him in writing the opera, and indeed, Berg is a constant presence
within Gruber’s highly personal soundworld: in Gruber’s ravishing
orchestral counterpoint and complex harmonic palette; his judicious use
of open fourths and fifths to create spacious, suggestive textures (most
clearly in the music accompanying the sinister, watchful Oskar); his
use of jazz and popular idioms with a languid dissonance – all rendered
with intimate understanding by the Vienna Symphony, conducted by the
composer. There are myriad thematic echoes, too, of Gruber’s elder
compatriot. For example, the nightclub scene in which Marianne is
revealed to have been earning her living as an ‘exotic’ dancer at once brings Lulu to mind (as well as some of Lulu’s
Third Act confusion with its plethora of characters and split frame
action), whilst her pathetic, articulated desire to have Alfred’s child
is a sharp reminder of Marie in Wozzeck – except that here of
course, it is the son who is killed rather than his mother, who is left
to endure an arguably even worse fate than that.
Sex, race and class are all examined in Tales from the Vienna Woods,
and prevailing values are found to be riddled with hypocrisy. Marianne
at least attempts to transcend her situation, but the inference is that
there can be no female emancipation in a world in which men are not only
threatened by women’s burgeoning sexual and political power, but caught
like rabbits in the headlights of an oncoming industrialisation. The
vision is both dark and clear, and the pessimism complete. However, just
as Berg lifts the suffering of Marie and Wozzeck onto a universal,
rather than individual, plane, there are at least glimpses of
understanding in this picture of a fast-fracturing society – albeit no
justification for the characters’ actions; an understanding which Gruber
clearly shares with Horváth in his care not to digress on any level
from the dialogue, tragi-comedy and hideous caricature of the play.
For here is a society still reeling from the horrors and confusion of
World War I – a theme which, of course, also underpins the Berg in its
setting of Georg Büchner’s much earlier play, Woyzeck. Indeed,
to my mind Gruber could afford to take further cues from Berg in cutting
some of the dialogue from his opera which, as it stands, is a good deal
longer than Wozzeck – and unnecessarily so, as Gruber’s music
is more than capable of conveying Horváth’s intentions with integrity.
For example, the butcher’s assistant might be a useful character in the
play, but adds nothing to the discourse in the opera, whilst the
‘confession’ scene could quite happily be truncated yet still retain its
message of a callous and venal Church.
However, these are minor niggles. That Gruber’s opera should première
in the year we commemorate (as the Bregenz Festival did) the hundredth
anniversary of the onset of the Great War is poignant indeed – and on
that basis alone the work needs to be heard in the UK. For in Tales from the Vienna Woods,
Erich represents a new and terrible kind of youthful certainty born of
the moral turpitude and mass vindictive cruelty that lingered across so
many countries – including Britain – in the wake of the war. Indeed,
Erich – a German – directly blames Austria, through a local elderly
veteran, for their countries’ disastrous defeat.
The new king for Erich and others like him is rationality – but of
what nature is this rationality? The new capitalism may be bringing
wealth to a rising class of self-made men, but it is cold and unfeeling
at best, and the mechanised politics of National Socialism gathering
momentum is a twisted parody of Enlightenment aspirations to a free,
rational and equitable society. The irony is that, lurking behind this
new worship of the power of reason, is a very real irrationality born of
terror; soon, of course, in fact to spiral completely out of control.
And here lies the ultimate power of Gruber’s whirling parodistic score,
which comes resolutely from the present even as it looks back to that
recent dark age of European history. For if it was beyond Horváth’s
characters to see themselves in all their fear and ignorance and
not-so-petty wrangling, how can we sure that we ourselves are doing
better in that regard today?
In case we might be tempted to distance ourselves from the events on
stage, Sturminger cleverly melds past and present in locating the opera
in a recognisably early twentieth century Viennese yet universal
contemporary setting. Simple naturalistic designs and beautifully lit
transparent screens evoke the ordinary with minimalist power as the
tragi-comedy unfolds – for comedy it is on many levels, if very bitterly
so. As we look into and through that unfolding narrative, the backdrops
in certain scenes are particularly effective in quietly prompting us to
question what is real and what illusion; for those apparently still
photographs of various landscapes turn out in fact to be moving films.
Look closely at that lake and you’ll see tiny waves and bobbing objects,
while that country vista has a lorry just visible in the distance,
travelling silently along a road. Where that road leads for Marianne
seems inexorably predetermined in this shocking and very moving piece.
But where it might lead for us today in the audience is, Gruber seems to
be suggesting, entirely up to us.
*
Music and Poetry Curator, Chansonnier and Conductor: HK Gruber Seestudio, August 3 2014: PHACE Trio / Wiener Concert-Verein Bernard Gander – schlechtercharakterstücke HK Gruber – Three Songs from the Musical Spectacle Gomorra Friedrich Cerha – 1. Keintate —————— Das Leben am Rande der Milchstrasse (Life at the Edge of the Milky Way) A sitcom-opera in seven episodes Werkstattbühne, Aug 1 2014 Music: Bernhard Gander Text: Johannes Heider and Christa Salchner
No celebration of HK Gruber can be complete without hearing his
extraordinary voice, so it was a pleasure to attend the first of a
series of three ‘Music and Poetry’ concerts at the Seestudio on August
3rd, in which he featured as chansonnier and conductor. Gruber had also
curated the event, and chose to present two Austrian composers from a
younger and older generation alongside his Three Songs from the Musical Spectacle Gomorra (1976/1991).
It was the PHACE Trio which opened the evening with a bravura performance of Bernhard Gander’s schlechtercharakterstücke of 2008 (terriblecharacterpieces).
Gander was born in 1969 and comes from a generation of composers for
whom the idea of any barrier between ‘popular’ and ‘serious’ culture is
frankly ludicrous. This is not to say that his music lacks seriousness
of intent. Indeed, some might say that Gander’s ‘sitcom’ opera, Das Leben am Rande der Milchstrasse (Life at the Edge of the Milky Way),
which had received its première at the Werkstattbühne on August 1st,†
took itself rather too seriously in its pseudo-philosophical examination
of the jargon, bureaucracy and soul-destroying officialdom of modern
life.
Gander had described this work as a ‘witty and morbid mixture’ of the
two genres of sitcom and opera, designed to be mutually complementary.
Whether the result is as innovative as his publicity claims is open to
question – after all, the notion of ‘soap opera’ is but a sleight of
Mark-Anthony Turnage’s hand away. But the score, at least, was striking
in its metal-inspired industrial grunge and deep-pitched acoustic
growlings – a soundworld superbly echoed here in this performance of
Gander’s ferocious trio for violin, ‘cello and piano. I suspect both the
string players’ bows would have needed rehairing after their
tremendous, attacking performance. There was lots of fortissimo,
with vaguely-pitched note clusters and glissandi intersected by violent
outbursts and sudden fragmented gestures. Highly effective, imaginative
stuff – and not lacking in conventional notions of timbral and textural
contrast.
Following the trio, Gruber’s performance felt gentle – almost quaint –
by comparison; the sight of him conducting the intrepid members of the
Wiener Concert-Verein whilst facing front to narrate the solo part was
certainly beguiling. And Gruber was on thoroughly entertaining form with
his inimitable Sprechstimme blend of drunken melodrama,
falsetto hoots and quasi-profundo grunts, bellows and rumbles; all just
this side of unhinged – and yet very, very sane. His Three Songs
were dispatched with an easy virtuosity by all (barring some dodgy
violin intonation), encompassing a stylistic range from lounge jazz and
cabaret to a sideways tilt at Stravinsky; the figure of Le Rossignol
jauntily propped up in the corner with a skeleton said it all.
Centre stage was then given to a very distinguished figure in the
form of Friedrich Cerha (b1926); a composer most celebrated for his
brilliantly sympathetic completion of Act 3 of Berg’s opera Lulu, but who has written a number of excellent works in his own right. A dazzling performance of his 1. Keintate
for narrator and ensemble ensued which, despite Gruber’s extraordinary
unflagging energy, ultimately felt just too long with its 50-odd
contrasting sections. But the audience clearly relished Cerha’s own,
firmly Austrian combination of post-serial contrapuntal writing with
dark and witty cabaret and Viennese folk music. The piece is full of
clever wordplay – the title is a marriage of ‘cantata’ and ‘Kein’ as in
Ernst Kein, the author of the text. Apparently, it is often performed
with a backdrop of coloured slides depicting what Cerha describes as
‘expressive, poetic or also sarcastic pictures of Viennese types and
scenes’. I can imagine that these would greatly help to carry the piece,
rather than relying on Gruber to do so through sheer force of
personality – however impressive he may be at the task.
† A production by PHACE and WIEN MODERN, in co-production with
Bregenzer Festspiele and the Wiener Konzerthaus. Delivered with panache
by a capable cast, amongst whom Bibiana Nwobilo and Bernhard Landauer
were outstanding. Directed and conducted with admirable clarity and
assurance by Nicola Raab and Simeon Pirenkoff respectively.
Wiener Symphoniker in concert: Festspielhaus, August 4 2014
Conductor: Claus Peter Flor / Trumpet: Jeroen Berwaerts / Banjo: Mats Bergström / Accordeon: Claudia Buder HK Gruber – Charivari HK Gruber – Busking – a Concerto for Trumpet, Accordeon, Banjo and Strings Franz Schmidt – Symphony No. 4
The final event of my visit to Bregenz was a concert given by the
Vienna Symphony under the marvellously sure and sensitive baton of Claus
Peter Flor. Here was a chance to hear yet further important aspects of
Gruber’s work alongside a symphony by Franz Schmidt which has long been
deserving of acknowledgement in the UK as a work of surprising power and
subtlety (for further information about the piece, see my review of a performance by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales last October).
Gruber’s Charivari (1981-3) was bound to feature in any orchestral programming around the première of Tales from the Vienna Woods. For in it the composer parodies the music of Johann Strauss II: specifically Strauss’s Perpetuum Mobile
op.257. Gruber describes the piece as an ‘Austrian journal’ in the
sense of a satirical pamphlet (of which there is a strong tradition in
Vienna going back to polemicist Karl Kraus
and beyond), and here the orchestra realised his burlesque energy with
intelligence and appreciation. Strauss’s well-known bass ostinato and
twirling polka rhythms were whipped along as if seized by a manic
dance-partner on a ballroom floor, determined to shake them loose from
their bourgeois foundations.
There was partnering of another, more unusual kind in the following piece, Busking
– a Concerto for Trumpet, Accordeon, Banjo and Strings (2007). Over the
years, the concerto form has become central to Gruber’s orchestral
output (the prospect of his writing a piano concerto for Emanuel Ax
is enticing) and it seems a perfect outlet for his keen dramatic sense
in its pitting of soloist against ensemble. Here, perhaps inevitably –
and despite Flor’s attempts to balance the instrumental forces – it was
the trumpet which dominated (superbly played by Jeroen Berwaerts), with
accordeon and banjo providing a kind of anti-continuo in textural
contrast. However, each performer – from soloist to ensemble – captured
an improvisatory feel in disarming contradiction to the notated
preciseness of Gruber’s score. With constant changes of colour,
character and inflection, layers of notes were piled on layers of notes
in a crescendo of deceptive anarchy. For however crazily complex
Gruber’s music might sometimes appear, his scores are always composed
with rigorous attention to detail, and a directness of expression lies
at the heart.
How different are the oft-zany trumpet solos in Gruber’s Busking
to the yearning, elegiac ones which open and close Schmidt’s Symphony
No. 4! It was here, in this mammoth, 4-movement but continuous
fifty-minute work that the Vienna Symphony excelled. Their sound was
rich and clear, making the most of the fine Festspielhaus acoustic, and
Flor sculpted each phrase with terrific structural awareness. Indeed, he
gave the piece a compelling, almost narrative, arc; pinpointing
Schmidt’s subtle motivic ingenuity in a performance which combined a
lightness of touch with an almost unbearable emotional intensity.
Schmidt is a composer who, in his own way, came to embody Vienna’s
split, bittersweet personality and who, despite being utterly different
from Gruber in so many respects, nonetheless also belies the fairy-tale
of Vienna’s gemütlich surface in terms of his career and aesthetic.
Hearing this man’s music, with its backwards gaze to the Vienna of
Bruckner and even Schubert, felt most poignant alongside that of Gruber;
a once-renegade and perhaps now prodigal son of that troubled and
mysterious, yet most fertile and magnetic of capitals. But more poignant
still for me on this occasion, was realising that the concert was
taking place one hundred years to the very day since Britain entered
into the war against Germany and Austria.
Following that war, nothing would ever be the same again for anyone who lived through it, and as Gruber’s Tales from the Vienna Woods
shows, succeeding generations are still struggling to come to terms
with its fallout and the enormous social changes which ensued, both good
and bad. As if in some kind of elemental acknowledgement of the moment,
as the symphony drew to an intense conclusion, an incredible
thunderstorm became audible overhead, as rain pounded in torrents on the
roof of the Festspielhaus. It was all most extraordinary – somehow
cleansing and uplifting – and it made for an unforgettable close to my
visit to a very special Bregenz Festival. With thanks to Wales Arts International for their generous support.
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