For the Kleist Year 2011, Charlotte Seither has written an ensemble piece for twenty strings and soprano for the Württemberg Chamber Orchestra Heilbronn. “Schatten und Klarheit. Verse für Heinrich von Kleist” should be interpreted as a portrait in sound of the beauty of Kleist’s poetry.

In Schatten und Klarsein, Charlotte Seither’s work for the Württemberg Chamber Orchestra Heilbronn for the Kleist Year 2011, the composer entwines twenty individual string parts and the vocal line of a soprano, which is treated like an instrument. The composer describes the conception of the 22-minute piece as an inexorable pull towards a “distant point on the horizon”. The starting point was a suggestive picture which stands as the central message in Heinrich von Kleist’s text Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft [Feelings evoked by Friedrich’s seascape]: “ein einsamer Mittelpunkt im einsamen Kreis …” [a solitary focus in the lonely realm] (which in turn was a dictum from Clemens Brentano). The text is a kind of contemplation of contemplation, a viewing of the view: Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Der Mönch am Meer [The Monk by the Sea], which caused a sensation in 1809 in a Berlin exhibition, portrays an expansive seascape against which the solitary figure of a monk in the foreground almost disappears. Two hundred years later, Charlotte Seither takes up the central motif of Kleist’s pictorial description and discovers a quintessentially utopian element which points far into our own time.

“What interested me intellectually is Kleist’s vision of utopia, that thought about one’s own self and the world which is also inherent in the formulation of the ‘solitary focus’. In the composition this model is realized in a kind of zooming-in movement to an imaginary point and back out again, without discovering where this focal point is. There is a constructive indecisiveness at the end.”

Seither has composed Verse für Heinrich von Kleist, not merely a setting of texts, but a transformation into sound of his poetry, dedicated to the poet. “For the vocal texts I use three short quotations from poems which have been taken out of context, each of which represents a gesture towards a change of direction which I, too, want to express with my piece. The choice is not concerned with the content, but with the tonal qualities of the text rhythm and the beauty of the poetry.” A long, stretched out musical movement, in which the soprano voice starts high, mostly without vibrato, “like an angel, as if the voice emerged from nothing, like a truth which was always there. Also, when she doesn’t sing, the space is light, unspectacular, but always provided with this heavenly arch” (Seither).

The merging of the strings and the voice, which float above the texture for long passages like a horizon at its highest, is about a game with tonal identities, “an attempt to blur the boundaries between vocal and the instrumental, the individual and his environment, utopia and the subject in question. The listener hears a single arch, dying away. At the end, the voice moves into a low register, where a soprano can barely be heard and only a low, soft, frequently broken piano register is audible, constantly being further reduced and unravelled.” The inspiration for the formal model of the process, which merges into a great arch of finality, is that utopian idea of infinity, that sight without boundaries which Kleist describes as an almost unsettling impression. And, as through a funnel, through her reference to Kleist, the composer looks back on the poet, who writes about the painter, who lets his character gaze out to sea, “a solitary focus in the lonely realm”.

Marie Luise Maintz
from [t]akte 2/2010