Search - Helmut Lachenmann, Lothar Zagrosek :: Lachenmann: Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern

A children's tale of the malnourished,the enraged

scarecrow | Chicago, Illinois United States | 12/06/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

""It was terribly cold and nearly dark on the last evening of the old year, and the snow was falling fast. In the cold and the darkness, a poor little girl, with bare head and naked feet, roamed through the streets.". Lachenmann's music no matter where situated, the purely instrumental seems to impart a subtext of the dramatic, some miniature narrative, even his piano solo as "Kinderlied" exploring evocatively piano harmonics gets away from the coldly abstract nature his music strives for, a creative dialectic.
This is an interesting opera, with two lines of thought, one from the celebrated Hans-Christian Andersen's tale "The Little Match-Seller", a disarming story where we can read it today as a metaphor for the homeless and the starving malnourished children around the globe. The other is text utilized here of Gudrun Ensslin who in 1968 set fire to a shopping centre in Frankfurt, with others who shared her convictions on the indifference of (then) West Berlin German consumer society. This opera is about the injustice in the Third World(we certainly could add the genocides witnessed since then in Cambodia, Rwanda, Kosovo very easily)the hunger and exploitation. Ensslin had written a letter in her Stammheim prison cell that is utilized in the text here as an insert. The music here is pure high modernity with extended timbres in all directions,a massive vocal vocabulary where singers and choir are called upon for pure vocal timbre not simply the delivery of text,clicking, percussive vocal sounds, whispering,babbling, shouting,murmurings,sexual angsts,declamations,wisses,glissandi,timbres on vowels and consonants. This finds its equivalent in the extended orchestra with the full vocabulary of string harmonics, plucking, Am Steg, sul ponticello,snarling muted brass pressing dynamic envelopes, glissandi,also extended scaled downwards in volume to threadbare piano mutings, harp mutings, striking the piano's insides. There is also a radio,or prerecorded material utilized at times that seems to come when you least expect it as part of the rich orchestral collage textures Lachenmann constructs. There are some obvious timbral cliques here, the stopping on a dime,halting the forces, changing gears, and where the shouting of single words triggers hammer blasts amongst the massive orchestral forces. I tended to bypass these obvious moments of high modernity for Lachenmann indeed construsts fanstastic, ethereal sheets, evocative blankets of timbres as the threadbare opening,"Auf der Strasse" barely audible moments,and of windlike timbres, string harmonics, and bowed strings muted producing a fascinating noise(s).There are 24 scenes,some constructed like miniatures as #2 "In deiser Kaelte" a mere 2 minutes, and then there are traditional like orchestral interludes(although the voices seem never to rest)#8 Die Jagd","the chase", has a kind of predictable violence to it,when the little girl looses her shoes, pointillistic scouring the entire orchestral canvas. There really is nothing beautiful here, perhaps that is a perceptive category modernity has done away with to death.The "jouissance" in the Lacanian sense is in the committment that modernity has ended, and that there remains starving humans throughout the globe.We take orgasmic pleasure in pure construction, in identification with injustice and its resolution.Lachenmann in the excerpted interview provided herein says that composing for him is a resolution of a trauma, one to find a voice in traditional genres, as this opera, but also string quartet, piano solo,all for which he has lent his imagination in servitude to tradition.
The black n' white photos included here in the booklet indeed peaked my curiosity,of the utilizing photographic images as scenic backdrops equivalent to the angular threadbare abstractions of the music. An opera in black n' white is indeed quite intriguing."

Lachenmann's Magnum Opus

Elliott V. Grabill III | Virginia | 01/04/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This piece is --without a doubt-- one of the greatest ever written in the last fifty years. Inventive and postmodern, few pieces of any time period come closer to the sublime than Das Maedchen. This composition digs deeper into the imagination of both composer and observer-- while shooting further into the phenomena of the percieved universe than any piece I've ever heard.



Contrary to R. Hutchinson's remarks, Lachenmann has a reputation in academia of writing some of the most structured music out there, and this piece is no exception. Hutchinson's statement that there is no "variety" makes even less sense, as perhaps one of the things that makes this piece most insteresting is its incredible variety-- of gestures, sounds, textures, languages-- every single aspect of this piece is varied. I do not know how Hutchinson approached listening to this piece, but in order to maximize one's experience of this piece, one must leave all values behind, including ideas of what structure is, as well as what "beautiful music" is. This piece may contain things foreign to the 21st century ear, but this does not make them bad.



On the contrary, I think that if there is one "avant-garde" CD that you should own, it should be this!"