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Paul Hindemith
Cardillac
L´Opera Bastille
28-09-2005
It must nearly be a cliché that ‘Hindemith’s genius for opera is largely unrecognized’ because for sure I’ve heard and read versions of this statement for years; it was not until Kent Nagano’s direction of the Orechestre et Choeurs de l’Opera National de Paris for a performance of CARDILLAC at l’Opera Bastille that this cliché has ever stood to reason.
The story, synthesized by librettist Ferdinand Lion from E.T.A. Hoffmann and Otto Ludwig, is spectacle enough (even for Hoffmann). The setting and orchestration, however, throws down everything that an aficionado of Hindemith’s music loves, including a heaping of verve and bravado that an aficionado bent by habit towards Hindemith’s instrumental music does not often hear.
Remember too that CARDILLAC comes from 1926, four years after the immensely febrile Kammermusik Nr. 1...imagine that music with four years of polish and there is something close to the imagination which unsprung CARDILLAC.
But the particularities of individual experience during ONE duration of ONE orientation toward ONE piece of music crowd in, especially in this case: currently and recently pre-occupied with several of Benjamin Boretz’ texts from the ‘70s (“In Quest of the Rhythmic Genius”, “Musical Cosmology”, “Composing with Electronics”, “what lingers on…” et al.), enwrapt in the atmosphere of the opera house (and Paris), and newly re-engaged with personally practical contrapuntal considerations, the 1 _-hour listening situation of CARDILLAC poured through several refractive conceptual lenses.
Make no mistake: these considerations are initiated by what Hindemith wrote, and no doubt would be, and would have been, different if oriented to music by another composer. But it remains, intense commitment to the listening experience in this experience called forth unexpected, though not necessarily un-invited, re-considerations of, for one, what was actually happening in the midst of this committed listening experience and, necessarily, in light of other present conceptual concerns? Intention is not in question here: I am here to see and listen to this performance of Hindemith’s CARDILLAC. What is in question is all of what is entailed in this intention; what are the internal co-incidences occurring while engaged with music, with this music?
Chronologically anatomizing mentally internal phenomena encouraged by the (frankly frontal) orientation to this Hindemith-engagement in light of the aforementioned conceptual filters yields no further insights than such as journalistic documentation may offer; rather, common zen savvy suggests that what is most often the case in such listening orientations is that orientation sui generis fuels the experience (in this case musical) toward an inertia closely super-musical: ignited by sensuously provocative earfuls of Hindemith the input/output nature of this listening reaches velocities close to outright distracting abstraction. Endemic to committed listening (though (perhaps) restricted to musics of committed interest) is the assured return to the aural engagement, suddenly and happily bereft of the aloft-floating fantasies incurred throughout.
And this is the case inside a listening to Hindemith’s CARDILLAC: throughout the unfolding plotlines, the “only Hindemith could do this” orchestrational and contrapuntal profiles, and the intersections of all of these, are the mental infusions, the inspirations that only the composer of this opera may (at this particular time) lay claim to.
Whatever one, at any time, may say about “lesser” musical thought and musical works, one may invariably say “at no time did I wonder what I was doing.”
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| | Posted 10/17/2005 12:03 PM - 26 Views - 0 eProps - 1 Comment
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