Musik & Ästhetik, 2004, Jg. 8, Ausgabe 29

O cambio felice. Rupture and isolation in »Così fan tutte«

Così fan tutte is not simply an enterneining Rococo opera buffa and tells more than the story of two ill-chosen partner-ships. Mozart's opera is rather an experiment in genre-identity in which a classical topos is transferred to the >modern< geometric-symmetrical order of Marivaux's experimental spiritual dramas: a general law is examined in vitro as it were. The theme the object of inspection is the »exchange«: in the notion of exchange (here an exchange of partners) natural processes are undone in order to reveal their superstructures. The author shows that this idea also defines the music as its organizational principle: Mozart composes virtuosicalliy with set pieces which for their part seek to naintanin a precarious balance between distanced convention and individual expression.

O cambio felice. Rupture and isolation in »Così fan tutte«

Così fan tutte is not simply an entertaining Rococo opera buffa and tells more than the story of two ill-chosen partnerships. Mozart's opera is rather an experiment in genre-identity in which a classical topos is transferred to the ›modern‹ geometric-symmetrical order of Marivaux's experimental spiritual dramas: a general law is examined in vitro as it were. The theme the object of inspection is the »exchange« (here an exchange of partners) natural processes are undone in order to reveal their superstructures. The autheror shows that this idea also defines the music as its organizational principle: Mozart composes virtuosically with set pieces which for their part seek to maintain a precarious balance between distanced convention and individual expression.

Witches in music

The stereotypical musical notion of witches was especially prevalent in the program music and opera of the 19th century and in fact developed a relatively homogeneous musical vocabulary. The author shows how one could even speak in some respects of the dovelopment of a topos illustrating and expanding upon this with selected examples

Pierre Boulez' Opera »Orestie«. The Stage Music to an »Orestie« (1955) by Pierre Boulez and the Opera-Project of an »Orestie« (1995) by Heiner Müller and Pierre Boulez

On a ticket for the Bayreuth Festival 1995 for Wagner's Tristan and Isolde directed by Heiner Müller a note on the dramatic conception of a text describing the basis for the music-theatrical work of an Orestie according to Aischylos can be found which poet and playwright Müller wanted to realize together with composer Pierre Boulez. Allegedly the project was not realized due to the fact that but for a few encoutners they did not get around to a real meeting becausse Müller died in December 1995. The materials published by Wolfgang Rihm together with the Müller Archive in Berlin in »Drucksache 3« though combined with Boulez' bundle of a complete stage music encompassing 158 score pages which the composer had written for the trilogy of the Orestie directed by Jean-Louis Barrault in the Théâtre Marigny in 1955 result in a completely different idea. Projecting the preserved Boulez score from 1955 which does not follow a conception of direction coming after antique examples within the theatre of the Avantgarde of Barrault to the year 1995 the year in which the collaboration between Müller and Boulez was supposed to be continued not forgetting the fact that Boulez was especially so after 1955 also looking into projects central to a new music theatre (1961-1968: the grand Artaud-Project Marges and 1974 teh extensive stage music to the scenic version Ainsi parlait Zarathoustra produced by Barrault) and already was on his way towards an »opera« the theory of the already fairly advanced state of this joint opera project of which neither of the two authors had much of an idea results. Müller's partial translation of the Orestie together with his notes result in a palimpsest of textual layers such as in the Hamletmachine. Therefore on the one hand a »Libretto« or script with stage directions choreography and masks (Nô-theatre of the Kumasaka) exists and on the other hand musical conceptions not of a narrative-linear but of multi-directional form of movement which could have corresponded to Müller's simulacrum.

Construction and program. On the fifth movement of Hector Berlioz'»Lelio«

The gradual dawning of a joyful situation triggered by the tones of an Aeolian harp in Berlioz' Lelio is echoed very subtly by making the development of this sound (and with it the memory of past joys which signals a chant de bonheur) is subsumed in this movement within a construction where individual tones are interconnected in a complex web of symmetry.

Music - quo vadis?

The editiors of Musik & Ästhetik approached various representatives of musical life - artists researchers and distributors - requesting them to give an account according to their own personal experience of what they consider most noteworthy in the current crisis-ridden situation affecting culture and the arts not least with references to a possible (European?) future. The statements form a multi-faceted picture.