Beat Furrer’s new music theatre project Wüstenbuch, based on texts by Händl Klaus, Ingeborg Bachmann and others, will be premiered in March 2010 in Basel. A text by the Austrian dramatist Händl Klaus is also central to APON for orchestra and spoken voice, composed for the Donaueschingen Festival 2009.
APON – (The absentee)
APON projects a text by the Austrian dramatist Händl Klaus into the orchestral sound. “The way from speaking to singing, the space between speech and voice” stands at the centre of Beat Furrer’s compositional interests. The two-part composition explores the range between two extremes – the spoken and the absent voice. Beat Furrer composes for “The absentee”, as the title APON means, translated literally. The relationship of tension between speech and voice allows the focus finally to shift to articulation at the moment of the obliteration of the voice.
Beat Furrer’s composing involves the opposing facets of this tension. The setting in APON “begins feverishly, evoked by the blazing morning light” (Händl Klaus): a voice in the desert. Händl Klaus’s text creates a key sentence in images of intensity and ardour: “Because I see you, I see that you go in the next hour, as I see”. In this movement, a dramatic moment (absence, death?) is anticipated, opening the second part of the work with an orchestral cry. An instrumental singing is then heard in the orchestra: the absent, transformed voice.
Beat Furrer says about APON: “At the centre are two voices. One – in the first part – is the speaking voice. I have analysed the harmonic structure of this voice and reproduced it instrumentally. The idea was to give this speaking voice a resonance, that is to say, to constantly alter it instrumentally. At the beginning, the space is very dry, but small, it grows steadily. It is as if the speaker is increasingly swallowed up by a space. I have always lengthened the reverberation instrumentally. That is the first perspective on the voice, which I double through what is actually spoken. To reproduce this voice naturally entails allowing the instruments to blend with each other perfectly. The ideal would be almost a wave-like sound of the individual instrument, whose characteristic rises through the overall sound. It is a fine polyphony within many glissandi of individual spectral components of the overall sound, but which merge to form a whole; the individual instruments should scarcely be identifiable.”
If the first part of APON is concerned with the alteration of the outer space of the speaking voice, in the second part, the song of an absent voice in the orchestra and its changing inner resonant space is reproduced. “I let a sung voice go on sounding instrumentally, indeed in all its tonal qualities, from the very distorted cries at the beginning to the harmonically sung sound. Our ability to constantly alter the space is the ability to speak. That’s the important thing in the comparison between the two movements of the composition.”
Wüstenbuch
In his new music theatre work Wüstenbuch (premiere: 14.3.2010 at the Theater Basel), Beat Furrer collects and illuminates fragments of text like broken pieces of earthenware from an excavation: there are scenes by Händl Klaus, who co-authored the libretto and whose pieces creates ambiguous puzzles of hidden results, together with passages from Ingeborg Bachmann’s Todesarten. The novel occupied the poet for decades and was not completed. It contains magnificent fragments of the description of a journey to Egypt from which the title Wüstenbuch derives. The starting point for Furrer’s music theatre piece was a poem from an ancient Egyptian papyrus in the transcription by Jan Assmann; this is complemented by other texts by Antonio Machado, José Angel Valente and Apuleius in the original language.
Beat Furrer describes Wüstenbuch: “Three people are on a journey to present-day Egypt; whilst searching for its origins, they encounter their own wilderness as an absence of memory, the phantasmagorias of their own memory and finally, in the last scene, at a very elementary level, a reflection of a utopian humanity, a just society: ‘Silence was kept, uninterrupted and fearless. (...) We ate from one plate. We shared and did not pray, sent nothing back, left no stone unturned, took nothing away, did not anticipate, or take any more.’ (Ingeborg Bachmann) … The music creates a perspective on the text fragments and gives them, so to speak, their own voice in their strangeness.”
Marie Luise Maintz
(translation: Elizabeth Robinson)
from [t]akte 2/2009