Manfred Trojahn’s work is unimaginable without irony. The composer celebrates his 65th birthday on 22 October – and continues to work as before, as an artist much in demand who is constantly setting himself new challenges. Gerhard Rohde describes the direction and central themes in Trojahn’s output.

At 65, public servants and salaried earners retire. But that doesn’t apply to composers, particularly not to one called Manfred Trojahn. He is simply continuing his forty-and-more years of restlessness. In this significant birthday year of 2014 (he was born on 22 October 1949 in Cremlingen near Braunschweig), the Trojahn premieres are piling up: in June „Ungewisses Licht”. 4 Fragmente für achtstimmigen Chor in Stuttgart, at the Richard Strauss Festival in Garmisch-Partenkirchen Terzinen über Vergänglichkeit after Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in July at the Festival in Aix-en-Provence Trois morceaux de ‘Quitter’ – after René Char for soprano and ensemble and Contrevenir commentaire for ensemble as a French premiere. The highly-acclaimed world premiere of his music theatre work Orest in December 2011 in Amsterdam was not so long ago, and at the end of October 2014, six days after his birthday, the work’s Austrian premiere will be given.

Anyone who knows or can at least correctly read Manfred Trojahn, who can be not only a composer, but also an eloquent or sometimes powerfully eloquent depicter of the world, must themselves possess an ironic distance from the humdrum aspects of daily life: irony can only be understood by someone who also views the world with a certain irony. In his essay reflecting on the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss’s birth in DIE ZEIT , Manfred Trojahn quoted a fitting passage from his last opera Capriccio. When, after all the turmoil around text and music, the Countess gently poses the question with some doubt and resignation about whether there could be “any ending that isn’t trivial”, the Major-Domo entering answers laconically: “My lady Countess, supper is served!”

Manfred Trojahn knows how to convert this kind of irony in the written word, in the description of situations, attitudes, feelings and other catastrophes into his musical language in an ideally-matched way. In the process, he does not distance himself from the text, doesn’t reduce it to atmomised particles in order to form a rather abstract theatre of sound and word, as was almost the fashion for a while. Nevertheless it would be false to conclude that he is composing a kind of “literature opera” because of his closeness to the literary text, to the drama in hand, to comedy or to farce. Trojahn the composer is interested above all in basic human situations in classic works which ultimately recur in different forms, as in his first opera Enrico (1991) based on Pirandello’s play of the same name: in a sublimely ironic way, out of a confusing costumed situation suddenly develops a reality with a deadly ending, which is why the “murderer” is forced from then on to remain in his deluded state. Trojahn’s music doesn’t drive existentially and expressionistically through the conflicts but discovers the absurd in them, as it also assumes increasing importance in our daily lives. Reality converts into ironic juxtapositions.

But Manfred Trojahn can be more than just ironic. “If music be the food of love, play on” – thus ponders the lover duke to tender lute music in Shakespeare’s melancholy comedy Was ihr wollt, from which the libretto for Trojahn’s second opera was created (1998). A piece of musical theatre world develops out of irony here: a human being, torn between elation and earthy pleasures in the night-time drinking scenes centred on the fool. Trojahn’s music to this comedy with deeper meaning changes ingeniously between the scenes, but is one thing above all else: a homage to the power of music and of opera – the “power station of feelings”, as Alexander Kluge once put it.

In Trojahn’s third opera, Limonen aus Sizilien (2003), based on three one-acters by Pirandello and Eduardo De Filippo everything comes together: the sensuous emphasis on pleasure typical of the south, the irony and the bitterness. And Trojahn’s alert and tonally sensitive music accompanies the dramatic events and the cast. From Limonen at the latest onwards, Trojahn the opera composer has emerged at the height of his powers, and with his most recent opera, the music theatre work Orest, he has simultaneously achieved a new existential significance. At the same time, this is an answer to the increasing tendency in society “to approach the special art form of opera cynically and indifferently”. Perhaps this pessimism is slightly exaggerated, based on negative experiences. All in all, however, opera, with its venues, especially in Germany, cannot complain of a lack of response. Here Manfred Trojahn is surely thinking of the truly desolate situation in the birthplace of opera, Italy, which he so loves.

The ‘milestone birthday’ of a creative artist is perhaps not the occasion to assess his overall output. Trojahn’s individuality and significance lie above all in the fact that, in the adaptation of older forms, in symphonies, chamber music, choral works, he has found his way to his own, lively, even modern musical language, without resorting to the somewhat well-worn term “Klangrede”, or tonal language. For Manfred Trojahn, give and take irony and communication, music is a “sacred art”, as the composer in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos once emphatically put it. Trojahn, who also pushes a personal masquerade of disguises and exaggerations in his essays Schriften zur Musik, ultimately knows precisely what music means to people and society: it is an indispensable part of our Western intellectual life, equally important to literature, philosophy and theology, transmitting to them with the power of its particular nature that emotion which our society unfortunately increasingly fails to appreciate. With his compositions, Manfred Trojahn has constantly worked against these tendencies. That’s the most important thing.

Gerhard Rohde
(aus [t]akte 2/2014)