- Date: 1999
- Composer: Matthias Pintscher
- Period: Contemporary (1950- )
Review
"Ich suchte" -- "I was searching" -- were the last prophetic words of Schoenberg's revolutionary 1909 "monodrama" Ewartung. Indeed, the work was prophetic too, in its aggressive freedom, its "emancipation" of dissonance and pulverized gestural language, and especially its flayed expressive world: here music became a mercilessly precise encephalograph for the nervous crackles of inner life. But those exact words, "I was searching," were prophetic in another sense, as the annunciation of a creative condition in which the "work" proper actually became the documented quest for the work, perhaps nothing more than the clearing of a space in which to wait, listen, find, lose, and find again.It is to this tradition that German phenomenon Matthias Pintscher seems to belong. For instance, his 1999 Hérodiade-Fragmente, a "dramatic scena for soprano and orchestra," seems thoroughly haunted by Schoenberg's own monodrama: the sound world is remarkable similar, so full of violent outbursts and trance-like, seismic self-meditations, and so is the situation -- a woman alone, careening between panic and rapture, gradually peeling away the layers of her solipsism like an onion. But when, near the very end of Pintscher's 25-minute score, the soprano sings "J'attends une chose inconnu" (I wait for an unknown thing"), we almost feel Ewartung enter as an apparition: here is that vital moment of absence, where the searcher and the object sought appear as opposite sides of the same page. And so it seems appropriate that Pintscher's music after this point feels like a radical extension of Schoenberg's own ending to Ewartung, in which the sounds themselves seem to scatter and evaporate.
To a certain degree, this aesthetic owes at least as much to the poet Pintscher here sets, the French "symbolist" Stéphane Mallarmé. Mallarmé's fantasy of the ideal poem as a single word on an unblemished white page is also at work in Pintscher's gestural and timbral vocabulary. One can hear this best around the score's eighth minute, when the music seamlessly breaks out of its more conventional expressionistic molding. The sounds becomes more private, less mimetic of known gestural forms and postures: an "authentic" weirdness begins to stretch its diaphanous hands throughout the orchestra to catalyze the most vulnerable sounds -- extremely high, floating violin lines which wiggle and gently tangle with immediacy, dispersing clouds of string trills and chimes, single, utterly unadorned long tones in solo instruments, bordering on the inaudible. And so, when a disintegrating billow of harmonics births a warm, neo-Romantic violin line, its familiarity feels essentially estranged, deprived of itself, surrounded by the blankness of a pure white page.
This uncanny scene continues, as the sonic table is lowered into nearer- and nearer-silences, permeated by wraithful harmonics and sudden, quaking outbursts, until everything gradually peels away into the closing minutes of this surreal monodrama. Here, the basic substance of the work itself, its "object of investigation," seems to pass through a cloth into oblivion. The music, a membranous collection of chimes, string trills, and harmonics, becomes a kind of glittering sonic dust, ignorant of itself, vector-less and un-dimensional. ~ All Music Guide
Albums with Complete Performances of the Work
| Title | Date |
| Pintscher: Music from Thomas Chatterton; Hérodiade-Fragmente | 2001 |
