Tardy but Timeless: Lachenmann in Vermont

Grant Chu Covell

[January 2025.]

In August 2023, rustic Vermont was the unexpected but apt setting for several of Lachenmann’s chamber works. I had noble intentions to capture some post-concert (and rehearsal) thoughts shortly thereafter but never did. Other things popped up, time slipped past. Alacrity is not a practiced virtue here at La Folia, but even so, a concert review 17 months late is rather worthless.

I meekly suggest that one of the things which slowed me down was Lachenmann’s program note. The Marlboro Music Festival provided it as a program insert. He said several things which (as an armchair critic, as a lapsed composer, as an eager listener) I believe to be true.

Dan suggested (seriously? archly? both?) that we run Lachenmann’s words with commentary. This knocks out multiple birds: I get to cover the performances, and you can read the composer’s notes.

* * *

HL: I distrust program notes, especially those by composers. A composer who knows what he wants only wants what he knows — and that is not enough. A composer has nothing to say, he has to create something, and what is created will say more than the composer suspects. Gustav Mahler wrote to his wife: “I don’t compose, I am composed.” Luigi Nono was shocked every time he heard his compositions for the first time. And Bruckner only had a childlike idea of the depth of his music.

GCC: The groupie in me was thrilled immediately: Mahler and Nono in the same paragraph! But what Lachenmann is saying is so true. The composer should write music and not write words. Music expresses what needs to be said, even if the composer doesn’t realize it. Words will always fail the music. Do not trust a composer who relies upon program note to explain music.

HL: Composing, like listening, should be an adventure that broadens our horizons of experience, and one should be different afterwards than before. The encounter between the listener and the work, be it classical or “new” music, should always be a journey of discovery — an adventure with an unknown outcome. And there is no introduction to such an adventure.

GCC: Here we go. Here’s the gauntlet. See it clearly. Walk around it. Pick it up if you dare. The idea of hearing Lachenmann at the Marlboro Music Festival is unexpected but fitting. Since 1951, Marlboro has been a destination to hear first-rate musicians play chamber music, mostly of the Classical kind. Luminaries such as Rudolf Serkin, Pablo Casals, the Guarneri Quartet, Mitsuko Uchida, etc., etc. have bestowed exemplary performances upon summer festival audiences. Pretty much everyone on that stage, whether seasoned or emerging, deserves to be there. You are guaranteed to hear the very best at Marlboro. In terms of caliber, Lachenmann is not out of place, just that audiences expecting to hear “The Classics” might be surprised.

HL: Unlike in all other cultures on this earth, the European concept of music — in whose magical magic we believe we are safe — has  constantly changed and opened up ever since the early polyphony over the course of a few centuries as part of European intellectual history. And as long as people can think and feel responsibly, this process will never end, because it’s not about “new sounds” or even “noises” but about new contexts in which the familiar once again seems completely foreign to us and might touch us in a totally new way.

GCC: Marlboro has not been unfriendly to composers: The festival counts Barber, Bolcom, Carter, Copland, Crumb, Dallapiccola, Gubaidulina, Kirchner, Kurtág, Perle, Saariaho and Widmann as guests. 2024’s composers were Adès and Sally Beamish.

GCC: Also, we must bring ourselves to music, not the other way around. Sure we might wonder how art relates to us, but we must go back and understand the creator’s intention.

HL: The three notes of the C major triad, whose surprising ray of light in Haydn’s Creation once swept listeners off their chairs, are the same notes in Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, in Beethoven’s First and Fifth, in Schubert’s endlessly wistful String Quintet, in Wagner’s Meistersinger Prelude, in Scriabin’s Poeme de l’extase, in Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, and as a small cheap coin in Alban Berg’s Wozzeck.

GCC: Lachenmann’s list unfolds a continuum of past experimentation which today seems normal, onto which he implicitly includes himself. Whether you accept this or not, it’s instructive to notice that these are mostly orchestral pieces, whereas the works which Marlboro offered were for smaller forces.

HL: Any musical experience, if it is to be more than just pleasant entertainment, should remind us that we, as human creatures, are capable of both: discerning and transcending the aesthetic horizon dominating our civilization. Since the early polyphony of the late Middle Ages, our Western concept of music as an element of Western intellectual history has constantly opened up and expanded. This process has always irritated and ultimately changed listening.

GCC: Here is where Lachenmann comes close to an explanation, or an apology. Folks who trek up to Windham County, about 3-½ hours from New York City, or just over 2 hours from Boston, MA, experience enough challenges with the traffic. A lot of them just want to hear Classical Music played well. Classical Music reassures them and does not challenge. Or maybe it helps them feel comfortable with their status in life.

GCC: We purposely planned a trip and didn’t care about the rest of the menu. I had my eye on catching the August 5th performance of String Quartet No. 3, “Grido” (2001). I passed on Friday night’s Got Lost (with Lucy Fitz Gibbon and Sahun Sam Hong) but caught Grido’s Saturday rehearsal and performance, and the Sunday morning rehearsal of Allegro Sostenuto. (Marlboro has a tradition of open rehearsals.)

HL: Composing as an “adventure with an unknown outcome:” After each completed creative process, I was no longer the same person as before. And I expect my music-loving environment to be so adventurous: I — not only I — invite the listener to be irritated in whatever way and to let their musical horizon of experience be opened up, and so I feel committed to our precious tradition.

GCC: Again, Lachenmann admits he’s a challenging old geezer, but he’s also pressing a point likely lost on unaccustomed audiences: Despite their similar gritty surfaces, great distances separate these pieces. Allegro Sostenuto and Grido are obviously non-tonal and rife with non-standard noises. But Allegro Sostenuto is an exposition of technique and idea, whereas Grido is thick with introspective development and sly humor. In the later Third Quartet, I hear a few “coincidences” which warrant a chuckle (at least one mimics a car alarm), and am routinely amazed by the unexpected C-major triad which materializes and dissipates so beatifically.

GCC: Grido was sandwiched between Brahms’ Vier Quartette, Op. 92, and Schubert’s expansive String Quintet. I do not budge for vocal music and would have wanted guarantees for transcendent Schubert, however, Lachenmann performed live had me set sail for the Green Mountain State. A Lachenmann quartet performed at Marlboro would have to be good. Jay Campbell, the JACK Quartet’s cellist, who knows his way around this terrain, was clearly in charge. Campbell’s colleagues Leonard Fu and Claire Bourg, violins, were enthusiastic, even as violist Sally Chisholm sometimes appeared indifferent. Don’t get me wrong: This is difficult music, and they nailed it.

GCC: Allegro Sostenuto was programmed between Beethoven’s perky Wind Octet, Op. 103, and Dvořák’s grand Piano Quintet in A major, Op. 81. Javier Morales-Martinez provided a liquid clarinet, Zachary Mowitz was the calisthenic cellist, and Marlboro co-director Jonathan Biss was the fervent pianist. The rehearsal process was fascinating. It was a privilege to witness the trio transcending the notation.

HL: Morton Feldman called one of his most valuable works: The viola in my life. My Grido, after two earlier (1961 and 1987) daring compositions for this mysterious, so richly charged genre, became for me “The string quartet in my life,” as another example of “musique concrète instrumentale,” which in its own way directs listening to the instrumental generation of the sound and its physicality. All my compositions, whether my String Trio, Grido, Allegro Sostenuto or Got Lost, always led me to another way of observing the familiar and the unknown in a new, stringent context.

GCC: A nod to Feldman! How many of those expecting something nice between Brahms and Schubert were disappointed, perhaps even angered. Notice that Lachenmann calls his quartets daring. The String Trio was played at a mid-week “informal” concert on August 9.

GCC: Remember how Lachenmann aligned himself with the Austro-Germanic Classical tradition back there? Name checking Feldman chalks up parentage with a very different but particularly intellectual and experimental family.

HL: Music not as a priori familiar “language” but as a dynamically moving “situation” that invites the listener to observe and at the same time to observe himself. This is how I experience music that means something to me as art: As an adventure of the mind in a largely spiritually hostile civilization. Music, not just mine, moves thinking and feeling at the same time. Both belong together; maybe they are the same thing. And “thinking…,” as the philosopher Ernst Bloch (The Principle of Hope) said, “thinking means going beyond.”

GCC: Perhaps something “got lost” in translation. I suspect the near nonagenarian felt obliged to conclude his reluctant words with a flourish. Bloch is tagged a philosopher. Perhaps aware of his American audience, the Nono student neglected to mention that Bloch was also a Marxist. However, the simplistic takeaway is that good music ought to spark emotion. Even familiar music should elicit a response. I suspect that Lachenmann was trying to reassure this late-August chamber-music audience that feeling bored or annoyed at “musique concrète instrumentale“ was all part of his plan. After all, the composer has confounded audiences for decades, and knows his worth.

[Helmut Lachenmann, Marlboro, Vermont, August 2023 (neither original language nor translator indicated).]

[Photo credit: The iconic Musicians at Play sign, photo by Pete Checchia, from https://www.marlboromusic.org/support/donate/.]