Wolfgang Rihm, Béla Bartók: Script to Script

BARTÓK-RIHM

Bartók had already made his preference for the combination of piano and percussion public a decade before the quartet sonata: in his first piano concerto, in which the new prominence of the percussion is also visually demonstrated by the players being »positioned directly behind the piano« become.

Piano and percussion belong to Bartók   family, after all schlagen yes, with the piano, the hammers on the strings. In the XNUMXs, along with Bartók, many a composer put an end to the illusion of pianistic bel canto and assigned the piano the role of a percussion instrument – ​​or even, like Stravinsky and Antheil, had several pianos compete against entire percussion orchestras.

In 1937, the billionaire Swiss patron and conductor Paul Sacher commissioned the Hungarian to write this second of a total of three Bartók compositions he had honored – it was preceded by the epochal music for stringed instruments, percussion and celesta, which idiomatically and tonally belongs to the immediate prehistory of the sonata. The constant contact with Sacher and other Swiss friends was an important support for Bartók - the mimosa-like, bitter-prone, uncompromising person in political and art-moral questions to the point of self-destructiveness - before he finally left fascist Europe, especially the German »robber and Killer system«, turned his back.

Even his four decades of passion for Balkan folk music, which he always called "peasant music," arose from political contradiction, namely his anti-Habsburg nationalism, and was also an escape to country life, which he, suffering from the hostility of the big cities, not idealized without naivety. For him, peasant music was "the impulsive creation of a people group free from all erudition." The exciting thing about Bartók's compositional use of his folklore studies is of course the intellectualization of these musical natural forces; For example, in the first movement of the sonata, the transformation of the dance music “alla bulgarese”, which operates with irregular meters and is free of theory and writing, into a complicated arithmetic exercise on the possibilities of dividing a 9/8 bar – and often layering the different results on top of each other . For example, the first theme (from bar 52) with its initially demonstrative C major blocks is not perceived as 9/8 time, but as 4/4 with an eighth note "valeur ajoutée"; the second theme (from bar 87) first divides the meter “Bulgarian” into 4+2+3 eighths, before it appears in all possible permutations (2+3+4) or other divisions (2+2+5).

The movement begins with a brooding, nine-note ostinato »row« that later, inexorably motorically, becomes the »moving« of a development that builds up with iron consistency. Bartók, the sensitive, meticulous, shy person who used the rustic as a remedy against too much refinement, refrains from his sonata, with all virtuosity, every sound perfume, every pianistic ornament - in favor of sounding elementary events, which he, according to of the dialectic of the »stile barbaro«, controlled with a keen understanding of art.

Of course, he also rules the final sonata rondo, the main subject of which is the artificially naïve scale theme of the xylophone, with a Lydian fourth and Mixolydian seventh over the piano's bare C major. Of course, its "folk tone" does not protect it from thorough development practices between four-part inversion canon and complete "atomization".

In the case of the sonata, too, Bartók himself only gave a brief and terribly dry commentary on the work. For the central Lento, for example, he wrestled a single sentence: "The second movement in F has the song form aba" - and that to one of the most mysterious nocturnes in music history! With the evidence of special music-architectural validity, which is abundant in the case of the Bartók Sonata, one would not do Wolfgang Rihm any favors. He, who does not shy away from confessions such as "I act according to intuition and very subjectively", composes "spontaneously", does not believe in programmed, schematizing construction plans including constructive logic that networks everything, instead lets his music derive from the dramaturgical feel for the respective " "correct" next compositional step.

Rihm writes a »musique fleuve«, a sonorous, process-like flow that »is energetically, nervously structured« and probably comes close to what Adorno described in 1961 as utopian »musique informelle«. Hand in hand with this goes a process that has long since been adopted into music by visual arts and literary theory as overpainting, palimpsest, contrafactorial, double, proliferation, rhizome, etc., and means the process of thinking further about what already exists, in music uncovering unused potential of already existing compositions. Script-Um-Script indicates with its basic dates of origin (1993/2007) as well as with its ambiguous title that it belongs to this species.

The piece, with its gradual development from selective events and sustained sounds to the complex interweaving of multicolored swinging, muted, glistening, hissing, booming reverberation and resonance spaces, has many »overwritten« predecessors, as Rihm reveals in the commentary on the work: »The work complex from which this one work is a labyrinthine field, a propagating group in which works cross out and push away one another and give birth to new parts. It's a natural process, not planned...'. If you go into the »labyrinthine field«, you will come across the wind percussion piece And now, the piano concerto Sphere, the piano pieces post study and  Headline.

Rainer Peters