Melancolia 1, for clarinet, harp, 2 string orchestras

• Date: 1976
• Composer: Harrison Birtwistle
• Period: Contemporary (1950- )

Review

"Progress overtaken. Inactive amidst instruments. As though geometry had outmeasured itself...as though beauty were an empty fiction. As though only mythology would endure." -- Günter Grass, "On stasis in progress," 1972

Albrecht Dürer's extraordinary allegorical engraving Melancolia I cuts a crippling vision into the consciousness of Renaissance art: it ekes an image of a space heavy and imponderable, where the globe's gravity has doubled, where light does not radiate but sucks in and devours; inanimates emanate an ashen lethargy amidst a coagulation of objects, each meticulously ripped into the picture's hard surface; tightly carved lines shoot and squirrel in nets of visual congestion. It's a stunningly beautiful picture of a stunningly ugly world, and one can only marvel at how Dürer could rend such a luminous likeness of such a torpid and somber scene. Melancholy is miserable, but its portrait takes the breath.

In this wonderful effect, and not merely in title, does Harrison Birtwistle's Melancolia I take after Dürer's image. Written in 1976 for clarinet, harp, and two 31-piece string orchestras, Birtwistle's score is essentially a long, agonizingly interior adagio. It is also a feat of musical imagination -- literally, it unfolds in time and tone a likeness, an imago, of Dürer's own imagined scene: here the music swallows its own light like Dürer's horizon; the lines accumulate into quiet, heavy cloth, and the entire musical orb rotates on an intractable axis with indolent, at times brutal inertia.

The clarinet and harp are clearly foreground figures: like Dürer's scholar and homunculus, or perhaps Orpheus self-accompanying, they tread the tactus through the piece, the clarinet drawing the longest beams of line and the harp bedecking it with resonant fragments. The two string orchestras, flanking this couple, cast shadows of both acute and abstruse shades. With predominantly gray and dissonant harmonies, they form an opposite, bi-folded background to the two soloists -- unlike the hard, etched voices of the clarinet and harp, the strings offer a surplus of soft detail, a suffocating tenderness, a sodden, scrim-like haze. At certain times they surge underneath the clarinet like uneasy undertow; at others, they clasp the soloist from above and below like jaws; at yet other times, the strings surround from all sides like a filmy, noxious atmosphere. In all cases, Birtwistle accomplishes an uncanny musical effect -- the slow disclosure, the stretch and maturation of a line, which takes time but goes nowhere. Perhaps the essence of melancholy, "black-bile": time is not progress, but only the time it takes to sense one's own mortifying stasis; melancholy is "stasis in progress."

"On stasis in progress: variations on Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancolia I" is the title of a chapter from German novelist Günter Grass' 1972 book From the Diary of a Snail, and is the second father of Birtwistle's doubly indebted score. Grass' title-phrase became a mantra for Birtwistle, but Grass' comparative melancholy -- "As though geometry had outmeasured itself" -- offers yet another imago around which Birtwistle's piece, so carefully calibrating its stasis amidst its progress, can orbit. ~ Seth Brodsky, Rovi

Albums with Complete Performances of the Work

Title	Date
Harrison Birtwistle	1993

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