Jörg Widmann

The Shape of the Shadow

Notes on Boulez’s Dialogue de l’ombre double by Jörg Widmann

I. “Now the Piece Belongs to You”: Working with Pierre Boulez

As a teenager, I had a revelatory New Music experience: I attended the Musica Festival in Strasbourg with my father, where Pierre Boulez was conducting his own works with the Ensemble intercontemporain. One of them was Répons and the other was Dialogue de l’ombre double, which was, of course, fascinating to me as a clarinetist and composer. A number of colleagues had warned me: Boulez, so brainy, so dogmatic, so strict and narrowly constructed. To me, it seemed the opposite: I sat there with my mouth and ears open. It was an extremely sensual experience, a rush of colors. My thoughts, my music-making would never be the same. It is one of the great strokes of good fortune in my biography and my artistic life that many years later I got to meet Pierre Boulez and that we worked together on many occasions. He premiered my orchestral piece Armonica with the Vienna Philharmonic, which was an unforgettable experience for all involved—Boulez’s analytical intellect and the warm sound of that orchestra created an incredible symbiosis.

Exploring Dialogue de l’ombre double was a kind of work in progress. Over the years, we kept collaborating on the piece. The first time was a performance in Badenweiler. We often talked about it, and Boulez had quite a bit of criticism—first of all, he had an unerring ear, and secondly a very clear idea of what he wanted to hear. He offered a lot of inspiration, but also stated unequivocally when he didn’t like something. I was deeply moved when he asked me to play Dialogue de l’ombre double for his 85th birthday at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris. The museum houses a Foucault pendulum. He suggested that I should place my music stands in a circle around the pendulum and walk around them while playing, with the audience in a circle behind me and the loudspeakers in a circle above me. It was an unforgettable evening. Boulez was not at all given to sentimentality, which is why I was just overjoyed when, after this last performance that we worked on together, he said to me: “That’s it, now the piece belongs to you. Now your playing is wild and controlled.” Those were the two extremes for him: the rational, to which he is often—unjustly, in my opinion—reduced, and that very wildness, including a childlike joy. It connected us. Some people are surprised that we worked together so closely for so many years, getting along so well, because our artistic thinking origi nated from opposite poles. But there was also a great number of things we shared: on the one hand, the knowledge of what it means to go on stage and actively make music, to create music in the moment. And, even more importantly: the sheer physical enjoyment of sound and of virtuosity, which we shared. As different as our approaches to music were, perhaps also our aesthetics—as a clarinetist, there are few people I learned and took away from more than I did from Pierre Boulez.

II. “The Limits of the Feasible”: Inspiration and Challenge

It seems to me that in Dialogue de l’ombre double the ingredients that characterize Boulez’s music—possibly characterize French music in general—appear in their most refined form. What would appear purely ornamental or redundant elsewhere, all those accidentals, grace notes, trill figures, here seems—I’d almost like to say sinuous. There is an incredible lightness here, a great mastery. Of course the piece does not stand alone or isolated. It has historical models, and it also has a precursor in Boulez’s work. Without Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet, it would be unthinkable. It also makes reference to the solo clarinet movement from Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps, “Abîme des oiseaux,” or “Abyss of the Birds.” If you look at the figures dominating its middle part, it’s a small step to this kind of figuration. The third element, which is often neglected in talking about Boulez’s position in history, is his fascination with the music of Bartók. The clarinet cascades that appear in The Miraculous Mandarin or at the beginning of Contrasts are recognizable here. And finally, the precursor in Boulez’s own output is Domaines for solo clarinet, written in 1968. As was so often the case with him, the material is already sketched out there. Without trying to evaluate it, Domaines to me almost has the character of a study, in terms of its composition and experimental quality, compared to the way the material then reappears in such an organic, masterful treatment in Dialogue. It’s impossible to consider these two scores independently of each other.

Speaking not only as a clarinetist, Dialogue de l’ombre double is one of my absolutely favorite Boulez pieces, and I consider it one of his great works. It is surely among the most difficult pieces ever written for clarinet—hypertrophic in its virtuosity and approaching the very limits of the feasible. But that’s what appealed to Boulez. There are very few among my colleagues who actually perform it, also because it requires so much painstaking preparation. In principle, it requires studying two highly complex pieces. The pitches alone demand intense study, then you have to add the dynamic level and the fluidity of the tempi—which is essential in Boulez’s music. You can see it very clearly even in the first strophe, there’s something happening in almost every measure. “Fluide,” “calme,” “flexible”—the tempo never remains the same. There’s also the enormous difference between “ralenti,” which means slowing down, and “cédé,” which indicates only a minimal reduction in tempo. In the fourth strophe, he prescribes an absurdly fast tempo, but at the same time writes, “Ne pas jouer dans la force,” in other words, “don’t overdo it.” And those spots where you might rest for a bit then have trill figurations, which means even faster phrases. Boulez makes incredibly high demands of the fingering technique. It’s an extreme piece, breathtaking in every way—a Mount Everest of clarinet literature.

III. “Magical Overlapping”: The Structure of the Work

The echo or dialogue of the double shadow that is ex pressed in the work’s title can be imagined in quite practical terms: the clarinetist learns two pieces. Long before the performance, I go into a recording studio and record the sections that will be played back during the performance. Then I start working on the live piece. In concert, both will be heard sub sequently, or in parallel. The tape begins playing in darkness—even before I have entered the hall. Boulez put down a very simple lighting concept in the score: whenever the live clarinetist plays, the light comes on; when the music is pre-recorded, it goes out; and so it switches back and forth throughout the six strophes. There is an actual dialogue happening. The piece is relatively clearly divided between the live part and the preconfigured recording, but the most fascinating moments are those when the two overlap. That’s where the magic happens, because the audience can’t always distinguish clearly which of the two clarinets, which are layered in a way as to appear almost unreal, is heard. The interplay of shadows is quite specific. So the impression is one of hearing a sound continuum that goes on for the 20 or 25 minutes the piece lasts. The live electronics really create new sound spaces that would otherwise be impossible, even given the most artful player and the clarinet’s ability to produce modulated sound. At the very end of the piece, Boulez asks for a sustained sounding high C, played pianissimo. Meanwhile, the tape offers wild figurations, perhaps even more virtuosic than any we have heard so far. The live note remains the same, while the pre-recorded layer fades out. And now something essential happens: from the tape, we hear a quadruple forte—sounding almost like a trumpet, as if seven trumpets were playing a five-fold forte with mutes. It’s the same note, on the same instrument, but these extreme dynamics open up two totally different sound spaces. It’s quite a magical moment. The second the listener might be able to decode the piece’s constructive principle, it ends. The timing is incredible. At the exact instance where the whole thing might be unmasked, it stops. It really is a mystery piece.

IV. “The Spherical Shape of Time”: Dialogue de l’ombre double at the Pierre Boulez Saal

Boulez always wished for this piece to be played in the round, and he did everything he could to have it performed that way, which makes it all the more wonderful to play it at the Pierre Boulez Saal for the second time now. The oval form is ideal for this work. Not only from the perspective of the audience, which sees the clarinetist moving in a circle. It seems far more important to me that in this hall, the sound coming from the speakers truly travels in a circle, in the most adventurous patterns. I don’t think this can be experienced in any other hall quite as perfectly as it can here. I’ve performed in this hall a number of times now, and I believe what happens to the clarinet sound here with this piece is as intriguing as a thriller. It’s a journey, but a journey that does not merely move straight ahead, as sound does in other halls, but fills out all the corners. Bernd Alois Zimmermann spoke of the “spherical shape of time”—here that becomes a reality.

I look forward immensely to going on this journey into the piece in my introduction, together with the audience, and to ask: what actually happens there? I think it’s going to be very interesting, because it is almost impossible to experience this in one hearing. Boulez plants a seed, then a new gesture is added, almost like a coincidence—the “lightning flash of inspiration”, he once called it. Of course he uses it quite rationally, but the why and how of it is incred ibly fascinating. I wanted to talk about that, as a clarinetist and also as a composer, and let the audience participate, giving them an insight into this workshop. I don’t think it takes away from the magic of the piece at all. On the contrary: knowing how the music is made, knowing its ingredients, can only make the sensual impression more intense.