Friedrich Cerha: Chamber Music

Commencement clause

György Ligeti said he was not a minimalist but a maximalist. It is no coincidence that the strict genius had a high regard for his colleague Friedrich Cerha, and it was not by chance that Ligeti called him a “Viennese underachiever”.

Cerha, too, dedicated himself to art with that uncompromising spiritual seriousness that has always characterized the Viennese avant-garde, especially in the confrontation with the city's intriguing traditionalism. In doing so, he lacks all airs, both that of the art missionary and that of the pure original genius of the German design. What is more typical of Cerha is the subcutaneous, proliferating network of musical events, Viennese that transcends borders and is profoundly abysmal, while also being intransigently radical...

The ethos of saying what one has to say is incompatible with submission to aesthetic dogmas and proven strategies of exploiting symbols. Cerha therefore cannot be classified compositionally... Parallel to Ligeti, Xenakis and Lutoslawski, he developed his own way of composing with sound surfaces and textures at the end of the 1950s, for example in the exorbitantly difficult one Spiegel-Cycle for orchestra from 1960/61.

Later pieces, especially the operas Baal, The Pied Piper and  The giant from the stone field, know tonal and cantabile elements that have repeatedly attracted comparison with Alban Berg, although sometimes Cerha's completion of the Berg opera Lulu has led to a keywording of his music that in no way does justice to its individualism.

Cerha was never concerned with mere eclectic colorfulness or even with aesthetic concessions, but on the contrary with mastering that squaring of the circle that is one of the fundamental problems of New Music: addressing the listener as undisguisedly as possible with the articulation possibilities of compositionally differentiated music, i.e. construction with expression or organic growth of form.

Julia Spinola

Chamber music with clarinet

After dealing with neoclassicism, the Viennese school and serialism, I have in my orchestral cycle Spiegel (1960/61) developed a tonal language free of all traditional formulations, which, however, differs from that of Ligeti, Xenakis or Scelsi through a high degree of emotionally comprehensible development processes, which in a certain way connects them - free of material references - with my musical roots .

Already in the ensemble work Exercises (1962–67), however, I began to let purist structures interact with 'regresses' that show clear connections to various language idioms from our European tradition. I didn't want to do without qualities that I love and gradually regain them. In my opera Baal (UA 1981) I finally succeeded in seamlessly weaving all my previous experiences into a musical organism.

Between this work and the chamber music combined on this CD there are further ›exits‹ in what was new for me, e.g. my engagement with non-European music. The works created since 2000 also belong to different weighted periods in my work.

Five pieces for clarinet, cello and piano (2000)

It was Heinrich Schiff who suggested that I should come up with something for clarinet, cello and piano, because the musicians were very hungry for a piece to play between the two relevant works by Beethoven and Brahms. It took me quite a while before I actually thought of the Five Pieces as a homage to his 50th birthday. They are not just sentences strung together, but form a cyclic unit.

The sequence of movements does not quite correspond to the traditional scheme, as the last piece, in which a line of the clarinet in the pp a repeated glissando-lamento phrase occurs, is very slow. In the first movement, which is also very quiet, the slow octave movement of the piano is accompanied by an uproar ff- Floskel, in the dark third piece, two other rapid phrases enclose a kind of chorale in the forte, which also appears twice in the last movement.

In the second sentence, an im pp scurrying Presto, and various complementary polyrhythmic formations play a role in the violent fourth movement. So there are direct and less direct degrees of relationship before the piece begins in an insistent quarter movement, which only remotely corresponds to the beginning of the work and which now includes all the instruments and extends to the fff increases, fades away in a reverberation of the last chord.

Eight Bagatelles for Clarinet and Piano (2009)

In recent years I have developed an aversion to the monomaniacal continuation, the ›worked‹ spreading of musical ideas. At the same time, the spontaneity of the idea, the 'flash' of intuition and its brief, concise formulation have become increasingly important to me.

That has in the orchestral pieces moments and  Moments led to a small scale within larger works, but also to the emergence of short chamber music forms such as the Bagatelles for string trio and two other such cycles for clarinet and for flute and piano. It was important to me to create sharply contoured, very different characters in the individual pieces, but on the other hand to create a convincing dramaturgy of the process and recognizable material relationships.

Unlike the string trio miniatures, the bagatelles for clarinet contain stronger folkloric allusions. I had re-examined klezmer music, the melody of which I had been familiar with since the 1950s; she certainly influenced me in the third piece (clarinet solo) and the sixth, which is entitled 'Klezmeriana'. The fourth, fifth and seventh Bagatelle were inspired by my own piano pieces from my involvement with Slavic music, which are based on experiences from my childhood.

In the relationship between the instruments, the second bagatelle is a veritable showdown, the fourth describes a cautious approach, while the fifth humorously plays with split sounds. The titles designate the gesture that prevails in the music. Of course, when I was writing, I had the noble clarinet tone of Andreas Schablas in mind, who has performed all my works for this instrument several times.

Quintet for clarinet and string quartet (2004)

The piece is certainly my 'most classical' work from a period of my work that points in this direction, which I have already left again in the 'Momentformen' mentioned. When I was commissioned to write a string quartet for BNP Paribas, however, I had been increasingly tempted to contrast the characteristic tonal substance of a solo instrument with a collective, or to let the two interact.

From 2003, a saxophone concerto, a violin concerto, the clarinet quintet, music for trombone and string quartet and an oboe quintet were created. In chamber music, interactions between the memorable character of a solo instrument and the particularly homogeneous sound of the string quartet appealed to me, although the tonal contrast in the case of trombone and oboe is of course greater than in the first clarinet quintet.

My general love for the clarinet, which I share with Mozart, but also the memory of a particularly beautiful performance of his work for the same instrumentation, played an important role in the choice of the solo instrument. Of course there is no direct musical influence on my piece, but the way the tonal interplay of clarinet and string quartet captivated me so much that it continued to have an effect on my imagination.

In principle, the characters of the four movements correspond to the classical principles, but they are infinitely richer in changes between often extremely different tempi and characters, in symmetries, lengthened or shortened variants of formal elements and in the possibilities of their complex interweaving. In the second, lyrical movement there are no allusions to Mozart, but there are some more or less old ideas of my own that I wasn't aware of at the time of composition. In the middle of the scherzo-like third movement, marked ›Intermezzo‹, I deliberately referred to the last movement of Haydn's Symphony No. 88, which I love dearly, in the form of a rhythmic play.

The fact that, despite some impressions and reminiscences, there is no pasticcio, but a convincing progression of form, corresponds to a general concern that I have always pursued, regardless of different interests: I would like to master what I have experienced in my music or what can be experienced today in complex organisms.

Friedrich Cerha