HÉRODIADE FRAGMENTS, DRAMATIC SCENE FOR SOPRANO

HÉRODIADE FRAGMENTS, DRAMATIC SCENE FOR SOPRANO AND
ORCHESTRA
COMPOSED IN 1999
MATTHIAS PINTSCHER
BORN IN MARL, GERMANY, JANUARY 29, 1971
NOW LIVING IN FRANKFURT
“My music,” Matthias Pintscher has said, “places its trust in the power of the poetic. … I
view my music as an ‘imaginary theater’ full of mysteries and secrets, always
rediscovering and redefining its own sensibility. It brings forth soundscapes into which
the listener can plunge, unleashing vivid pictorial associations and turning into a mirrorimage of faded realities.” He might have been thinking most particularly of this present
work, his 25-minute “dramatic scene” Hérodiade-Fragmente (Hérodiade Fragments),
which unveils on its imaginary stage a woman contemplating herself in a mirror.
A HEROINE’S SELF-ABSORBED SELF-EXPRESSION
She is Herodias, a member of the incestuous royal family of Judaea in the first century
A.D., who married two of her uncles in turn and had, by the first of them, a daughter
known for her fatal dance: Salome. Eighteen and a half centuries later, mother and
daughter became figures of fascination again, for writers—including Stéphane Mallarmé,
Gustave Flaubert, and Oscar Wilde—who saw them as examples of superb decadence.
As embodied here, Herodias takes her words from Mallarmé’s version, a verse
drama the poet began when he was 22, but of which he completed only three sections: an
“overture” in the form of a servant’s exalted declamation, a scene in which this servant
provides prompting and punctuation for Herodias’s self-absorbed self-expression, and a
suitably compact song for John the Baptist at the instant of his beheading. Pintscher’s
setting is of fragments from these fragments: three sequences from the scene for the
heroine, in which she salutes her mirror, contemplates her image therein (“Oui, c’est pour
moi”), and draws away into uncertainty and expectation (“J’attends une chose
inconnue”). Mallarmé in this scene takes a situation Racine would have approved—that
of an emotionally beleaguered queen, drawn out by her servant to speak of her feelings in
high- flown lines following the classic alexandrine meter—and empowers it with a quite
new kind of poetry. This opens the possibility—which Pintscher fully exploits—of a
highly formal stance, such as might be found in a Gluck opera or a concert scena by
Mozart, but for a character whose expressive language is that of a later and more complex
time.
THE COMPOSER
Pintscher’s choice of a very literary text is characteristic. Poets are the heroes of both the
operas he has written so far: Thomas Chatterton (1998) and L’Espace dernier, on the life
and work of Arthur Rimbaud (2004). Other works include a set of “songs and snow
pictures” after poems by e.e. cummings, as well as earlier Rimbaud settings. At a more
essential level, his music often seems to behave like a language: indeed, to speak—in
syllables and words made of the most variegated sounds, following the example, in
particular, of Alban Berg.
This combination of aural sophistication with firm expressive purpose brought
him quickly to the eminence he has maintained. Born in 1971 in the industrial town of
Marl, on the edge of the Ruhr district, he became a protégé of Hans Werner Henze when
he was 19, began winning important prizes and scholarships in his very early 20s, and
was featured at the Salzburg Festival when he was 26. In more recent years he has been
composer- in-residence with the Cleveland Orchestra (2000-02) and has written a violin
concerto for Frank Peter Zimmermann, en sourdine (2002), always developing the same
basic features of imagination and style.
A CLOSER LOOK
Pintscher composed Hérodiade Fragments in 1999, by which time, he has said, he had
lived with the text for 12 years, allowing the music to grow inside him. What attracted
him, by his own account, was the elaborate way in which the text is put together—the
attention to detail, so that often the rhythmic continuity is effaced by the momentary
brilliances of the words. Singing these words, his soprano enters what he has called “an
acoustically mobile, variable space.” “The singer sends things out like an echo- locator,”
he goes on, “and attempts thereby to grasp this space, as well as to define her particular
relationship to the abstraction as a lost individual. And the other voices react to that.”
One might also say that what the orchestra provides, through its abstract space, its
other voices, is Herodias’s mirror. Just as a silvered glass presents Herodias with an
image of herself in another space, so the orchestra reflects the singing voice at another
time, doing so very precisely at moments where the singer stops, whereupon instruments
take over her most recent sounds. The first example comes at the end of the soprano’s
opening line, where, already in the text, there is a characteristically Mallarméan reflexive
play of sound and sense, “miroir” (mirror) extending the sounds of “moi” (me). In
Pintscher’s setting, the soprano’s F (“moi”) is brought back after a short gap by a choice
grouping of harp with clarinets plus solo cello and bass. This sound then vanishes into
silence, from which the note returns as a solo viola harmonic before being recaptured by
the soprano, who sings while the F of herself goes on echoing in the orchestra.
Similar resonances of the voice—imitations of the vocal melody or, more usually,
of vocal sounds, coming from solo instruments or small ensembles—are almost
omnipresent from this point, and sometimes, when bowed percussion instruments or
softly colored clarinets are involved, one may be unsure whether the sound is not indeed
vocal. “Camouflaging sounds,” Pintscher has said, “is part of my compositional thinking,
so that one can never exactly be sure who is playing or where the sound is coming from.”
This requires considerable virtuosity from instrumental soloists, together with care in
blending and matching. “The freedom of the whole,” Pintscher concludes, “depends on
the absolute control of details.”
Besides offering the soprano this highly polished mirror, Pintscher’s versatile
orchestra is also there, like the servant in Mallarmé’s text, to support and goad. It has its
own language of exclamations and punctuation signs, beginning at once, and these are
developed throughout the score. Indeed, though this orchestral voice does not come from
a human body, it gradually creates a being as impassioned as the delirious soprano.
Mallarmé’s Herodias sees in her mirror a spectacle of luxury — “gardens of amethyst …
Gold concealed”—with a fixation on image, distance, and coldness that is turning her
heart to precious stone. By giving her instead a mirror of music, Pintscher brings her
echoes from a warmer world, one within which she can perhaps find rest.
—Paul Griffiths
Program note commissioned by The Philadelphia Orchestra Association; © 2004 Paul Griffiths
Hérodiade-Fragmente
(Stéphane Mallarmé—1842-98)
Hérodiade Fragments
Assez! Tiens devant moi ce miroir. O miroir!
Eau froide par l’ennui dans ton cadre gelée
Que de fois et pendant des heures, désolée
Des songes et cherchant mes souvenirs qui sont
Comme des feuilles sous ta glace au trou profond,
Je m’apparus en toi comme une ombre lointaine,
Mais, horreur! des soirs, dans ta sévère fontaine,
J’ai de mon rêve épars connu la nudité!
Enough! Hold before me this mirror. O mirror!
Cold water by weariness frozen in your frame,
How many times and during many hours, desolate
By dreams and seeking my memories which are
Like leaves beneath the deep hollow of your ice,
I saw myself in you like a distant shadow,
But, horror! Some evenings, in your harsh pool,
From my scattered dreams I have known nakedness!
Oui, c’est pour moi, pour moi, que je fleuris, déserte!
Vous le savez, jardins d’améthyste, enfouis
Sans fin dans de savants abîmes éblouis,
Ors ignorés, gardant votre antique lumière
Sous le somber sommeil d’une terre première,
Vous, pierres où mes yeux comme de purs bijoux
Empruntent leur clarté mélodieuse, et vous
Métaux qui donnez à ma jeune chevelure
Une splendeur fatale et sa massive allure!
Quant à toi, femme née en des siècles malins
Pour la méchanceté des antres sibyllins,
Qui parles d’un mortel! selon qui, des calices
De mes robes, arôme aux farouches délices,
Sortirait le frisson blanc de ma nudité,
Prophétises que si le tiède azur d’été,
Vers lui nativement la femme se dévoile,
Me voit dans ma pudeur grelottante d’étoile,
Je meurs!
Yes, it’s for me, for me, that I flourish, deserted!
You know this, gardens of amethyst, kept secret
Endlessly in some knowing abysses bedazzled,
Gold concealed, keeping your ancient light
Beneath the somber sleep of a primeval night,
You, stones in which my eyes like purest jewels
Borrow their melodious brightness, and you,
Metals that give to my youthful hair
A fatal splendor and its massive appearance!
As for you, woman born in an evil age
To do the wickedness of sibylline caverns,
Who speaks of a mortal! Who knew that, from the folds
Of my robes, scent of fierce delights,
Would come from the pale shiver of my nakedness,
Foretold that if the calm azure of summer,
Before which woman by nature is revealed,
Looks upon my modesty trembling like a star,
I die!
J’aime l’horreur d’etre vierge et je veux
Vivre parmi l’effroi que me font mes cheveux
Pour, le soir, retirée en ma couche, reptile
Inviolé sentir en la chair inutile
Le froid scintillement de ta pâle clarté,
Toi qui te meurs, toi qui brûles de chasteté,
Nuit blanche de glaçons et de neige cruelle!
I love the horror of being virginal and I want
To live in the terror my hair makes me feel,
At night, lying in my bed, serpentine,
Unviolated, feeling in my useless flesh
The cold sparkling of your pallid lightness,
You who die, you who burn with chastity,
Pale night of icicles and cruel snow!
Et ta soeur solitaire, ô ma soeur éternelle
Mon rêve montera vers toi: telle déjà,
And your lonely sister, o my eternal sister,
My dream will rise toward you: as it has already,
Rare limpidité d’un coeur qui le songea,
Je me crois seule en ma monotone patrie
Et tout, autour de moi, vit dans l’idolâtrie
D’un miroir qui reflète en son calme dormant
Hérodiade au clair regard de diamant …
O charme dernier, oui! Je le sens, je suis seule.
Rare lightness of a heart that dreamed it once,
I feel alone in my dreary country
And everything around me lives in the idolatry
Of a mirror reflecting in its sleeping stillness
Herodias, whose bright gaze is a diamond …
O final enchantment, yes! I feel it, I am alone.
J’attends und chose inconnue
Ou peut-être, ignorant le mystère et vos cris,
Jetez-vous les sanglots suprêmes et meurtris
D’une enfance sentant parmi les reveries
Se séparer enfin ses froides pierreries.
I wait for something unknown
Or perhaps, knowing not the mystery of your cries,
You utter the final and wounded sobs
Of a childhood that feels, among its dreams,
Its frigid gems drop away at last.
English translation by Darrin T. Britting; © 2004
The Philadelphia Orchestra Association