Krzysztof PenderecKi - Schott Music

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bedeutet es nicht nur die Selbstverständlichkeit eines
immer neuen Sujets, es heißt auch die Techniken der
Darstellung auszutauschen. So wird mit der Opera buffa
nach dem frühdadaistischen Stück „Ubu Roi“ von Alfred
Jarry in der Gänze Neuland beschritten. Penderecki
spielt mit der Buffo-Gattung selbst, ihr Regelwerk, ihre
Wirkungsmechanismen werden aufgegriffen und in ein
verzerrtes, wenig rund laufendes Räderwerk gesetzt. Ihr
Gegenstand war schon immer die Überdehnung, und
die Vorlage von Jarry, ein meisterlicher Streich zwischen
Pubertät und Genie, wie er wohl nur in Frankreich nach
Rimbaud sich ausbilden konnte, bot hierfür reichlich
Raum. Das Unernste ist das Ernste, und nur wenige
neben Penderecki wagten sich mit dem Vokabular der
Moderne auf dieses ebenso schillernde wie gefährliche
Glatteis der Ironie.
tHe MAteriAL
And tHe subject
Krzysztof Penderecki‘s hitherto operas
When entering the operatic stage with the
music-theatre work The Devils of Loudun in
1969, Penderecki found an almost deserted
scene with regard to contemporary operatic art. At that
time, the musical avant-garde did not write any operas;
the first performance of Luigi Nono‘s Intolleranza at the
Teatro La Fenice in Venice was a fiasco that seemed to
justify the warnings about staging a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’
[unified work of art]. The composer Hans Werner Henze
who had moved to Italy to avoid this avant-garde and
who touched upon light musical entertainment with
works such as Der junge Lord, was not counted among
the circles of aesthetic progression. The only opera left
was the opera Die Soldaten by Bernd Alois Zimmermann
which actually achieved recognition on the stage as an
undisputedly modern work.
At that time, Penderecki, who had been able to force
his way into the church with his St. Luke‘s Passion premiered
in 1966, started searching for opera subjects
which could provide the counterparts of the experimentally
developed means of musical language. These
means consisted mainly of a vast complex of sounds
which was extended both by means of unusual playing
techniques and by including novel ‘instruments’ (pipes,
saws, metals, woods, etc.) as well as by a differenti-
ated cluster technique. Though Penderecki regarded
the cluster primarily as a stationary area (in contrast
to György Ligeti, for example, who formed clusters
from individual parts mostly by means of dense contrapuntal
woven patterns), he distinguished several
groups of different external effects. There are, for example,
divergent densities such as diatonic, chromatic
or even quarter-tone superimposition; then Penderecki
experimented with clusters that move inside (the musicians
play randomly various tones within the compass
of the cluster or traverse it with inconsistent glissando
movements). Finally, there are various forms of composition
and de-composition (from an individual tone to
a sequence of sounds and vice versa) or even shifting
clusters (for example, each individual instrument takes
a step or a glissando upwards, thus shifting the whole
complex upwards, too).
Krzysztof Penderecki, Dr. Ernst Haeusserman (Direktorium
Salzburg Festival) in Salzburg, 1982
The work The Devils of Loudun composed in 1968/69
proved emphatically Penderecki‘s sure sense of impression
in the choice of his subjects. The text is by Aldous
Huxley who tried to reconstruct the case of 1634 after
thorough research work, using court records and contemporary
reports. John Whiting dramatised the text
which was then translated into German by Erich Fried.
Though the subject facilitated individual characterisations,
the main emphasis was placed on crudely explicit
descriptions of crowd scenes, visionary faces and forms
of mass hysteria. It is a mixture of clerical fumes, pain
and blood, possessed groaning and screaming. The
slow-moving cluster, the disappearance of individual
tones in the mass and the cluster‘s rude power directed
towards the outside correspond, as regards content,