Christian Ofenbauer: Two Frankfurt Preludes

CHRISTIAN OFENBAUER TWO FRANKFURT PRELUDES

Christian Ofenbauer Frankfurt Preludes (1997 / 1998) bear witness to a stylistic transition. From a distance of two decades, today's ears are amazed at how consistently and strongly they explain this transition to their musical theme, reflect on the change, work through it - even more than the audience realized at the premiere on November 19, 1999 could have been, the recording of which is documented on this CD, and also stronger than the composer might have guessed at the time. This diptych consists of markedly unequal parts which, apart from the required instrumental forces, have hardly anything in common, and indeed cannot even be performed by the same orchestra without a long concert break with considerable alterations in between. Nevertheless, their inner connection remains palpable in a strange way.

Until the mid-1990s, Ofenbauer's musical language was characterized by a will to express itself, which drew its strength above all from contrasts and collisions, from the monumental, fragmentary, gestural. After completing his opera Medea (1990–94), however, the composer felt this phase was over and consciously wanted to set out for new stylistic shores. After a one-year creative hiatus, the intensified, overheated, condensed increasingly gave way to the cool and calmly flowing, the mellow and unadorned, the reduced, quiet. Since then, it has seemed as if Ofenbauer's music had become aware of time and its passing on a higher level – and as if, without clinging to the moment, it could make it linger.

Created on behalf of the Hessian Broadcasting Corporation, the Frankfurt Preludes on a tightly woven structural grid – even if one would prefer to explain this fact as the »private matter« of the composer, as Arnold Schönberg, for example, wanted his twelve-tone method to be understood. In concrete terms, Ofenbauer based both pieces on the one hand on a rhythmic pattern, a quasi-serial organization of duration, and on the other hand also on a polyphonic, quarter-tone harmonic outline with, as it were, common tones from one chord to the next. However, his actual idea for the work was different. One could describe it with the image of a pillar: Does it protrude in the 1. Prelude lean and intact to heaven, she is in 2. Prelude overturned, disintegrating lengthwise into segments - and the resulting cloud of dust has probably not yet completely settled.

In just thirty bars and a little over one and a half minutes playing time, im 1. Prelude a compression literally taken to the extreme. This extreme structure reflects a thought of Ofenbauer from conversations with Heinz-Klaus Metzger, who thus became the dedicatee of the piece: boldly compressed in terms of time, as it is layered on top of one another in the score vertical, a large orchestra expresses the content of an evening-length work at once. Five inhomogeneous groups of instruments fill, each on their own, the pauses between individual, fraying tutti beats with ever-increasing proliferation until the degree of maximum fullness is reached and the piece then breaks off.

Im 2. Prelude topples this thin pillar - in two senses. On the one hand, the 84 instruments, as specified in the score, thread their way through the performance space along a diagonal, whereby a wavy line with gentle curves may result. This results in an individual listening angle for each seat, sometimes very close and sometimes far away from certain instruments, each of which performs its own voice. (In some sections, the stove builder ensures that the wood, sheet metal, strings, percussion, etc. are mixed as thoroughly as possible.) On the other hand, the structural framework also tilts, even overturns, lands on its head. That means: It goes through with certain freedoms 2. Prelude the development of the 1. Prelude now in the opposite direction, namely in the radical stretching to 50 minutes.

The long sustained sounds that grow out of this concept and are interspersed with partly indeterminate individual events are primarily coordinated by stopwatches. The conductor initially organizes the expanding, expanded geography of the sound at just a few neuralgic points. Exactly in the middle of the piece (after 25 minutes) but begins in the ppp a first precisely timed section, namely from the conductor's stand at the periphery, which then, however, passes over to the close-up area, continues in the center of the orchestra diagonal and there, after a further excursion to the edge, also silts up again for the time being. A holey pizzicato surface topples into a noisy tremolo before the second large, conventionally conducted section begins at the edges, but then quickly spreads to the middle as well. The climax in the 47th minute unites all the instruments "as quietly as possible" in the close interlocking of 84 rhythmically independent individual voices. But this unheard-of density soon begins to thin out - a last wafting of the whole orchestra in the ppp flows into one dying-Sound of the flutes and clarinets, which finally disappears in a gentle crescendo of the drums.

Such a technical description of what is happening that states that the 2. Prelude structurally exactly where that ends 1. Prelude has begun, of course, pales in comparison to the actual listening experience. As the 2. Prelude gradually pulls you into its slowness and attunes you to how rhythmic patterns click into place, but also disappear again, how movements collide or emerge from each other, how this creates a chain of musical mini-dramas with temporary, small eruptions - in short: how emotionally simmering it may still be in this music of transition to letting go, to intention-free, to a certain extent pure sounds, that wants to be listened to personally. The development seems to end somewhere between misty, drifting chords and dripping tones, in a gently moving stillness, characterized by the beauty of resolved conflicts. The fact that the final gesture means a small disturbance, that some dust is raised one last time, perhaps refers to the subtitle of the Preludes: Two cranes and clouds goes back to Dante's Divine Comedy, in whose 5th canto of hell Dante sees "the victims of sinful love chased along restlessly by never resting storm winds" (Friedrich von Falkenhausen) as cranes. Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta are a conspicuously inseparable couple among them: her husband Gianciotto surprised his brother with Francesca in adultery and they are said to have killed with a single prank - the sudden end left no time for remorse and meant the punishments of hell. Condemned to eternal love, the memory of their past happiness causes the couple exquisite torment, for their flight knows no rest. Bertolt Brecht added 1928 in the poem Die Lienden clouds are added to the image of the cranes, which accompany the migration of birds »with the same haste« so that a static state results: a standstill in the midst of constant movement. »Thus does love seem like a hold to lovers.«

Walter Weidringer

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