Yesterday was the 70th birthday of Helmut Lachenmann, one of the most fearsome creative intellects in new music.
Lachenmann's work invites controversy. The bulk of his output is large-scale, requiring orchestral musicians to learn specialized, unconventional techniques, plus a whole new notation. At times they have reacted with incredulity, or hostility -- in Stuttgart, members of the Southwest Radio Symphony Orchestra initially refused to play his work Staub, despite it being the orchestra's own commission.
Today, such confrontations are mostly a thing of the past: musicians' resistance has given way to respect, thanks to Lachenmann's combination of charm, integrity and quiet authority. He takes his own violin to rehearsals to demonstrate fingerings for obscure harmonics, and likes to work in detail with individual players.
Principal flautist Gaby Pas-Van Riet was one of his few admirers at the time of the Stuttgart "revolt" in 1985. Delighted by her determination, laughter and passion, Lachenmann spoke of writing something for her one day. Ten years later, she received a phone call: the "something" had become an enormous double concerto for flute and trombone, eight male voices and orchestra.
The resulting composition was Nun, one of the most remarkable orchestral works of the past decade. Unlike many of the composer's other works, in which precision is paramount, Nun climaxes in a part-free cadenza, during which the soloists improvise around given figurations. The conductor also improvises, moulding the orchestra at will, adding and removing instrumental groups.
Helmut Lachenmann was born in Stuttgart and studied at its Musikhochschule, where he later became professor of composition. For many years he taught at the Darmstadt summer school, in the footsteps of Stockhausen, Boulez, Ligeti and Adorno. His music is radical and politically motivated, and it is easy to label him as typical of the incestuous German avant-garde scene and its contorted polemics. But that would be simplistic.
As a young man, Lachenmann went to Venice to study with Luigi Nono. It was a life-changing experience. Then in his 40s, Nono was a prominent leftwing idealist and member of the Italian Communist party. He was already growing apart from the Darmstadt avant garde, whose music, according to Lachenmann, he regarded as "baroque." For Nono, every note had to have a political and structural purpose. It was a gruelling apprenticeship. "I never dared to write a trill," Lachenmann recalls. "If I wrote two notes together, Nono would say, `This is a melodic cell,' or he would demand, `Where is your political standpoint?'"
Perhaps the timeless atmosphere of Venice also affected Lachenmann. His music sounds nothing like Nono's, but to an even greater degree it is purged of conventional "bourgeois" procedures. And it is full of resonances: high and low, simple or intricate. Sounds breathe into life, crackle and bustle, erupt and cascade, aggregating into staccato chords whose tones linger in the air, like distant bells. A fine example is his piano concerto Ausklang (Sounds Fading).
On his return from Venice, Lachenmann resolved to continue Nono's conceptually purist ethic and create music that would be rigorously non-figurative. Like others at the time, he explored every possible way instruments could be used. Working at the margins of sound, his early scores contain as many gradations of noise as of pitch.
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