“Stay Awhile, in Melodious Flight”

A Birthday Concert for Jörg Widmann

Kerstin Schüssler-Bach

A 50th birthday is often a moment that makes people pause or look back, or even take stock for the first time. Not in the case of Jörg Widmann, who was born in Munich on June 19, 1973. He looks ahead, always focused on the next piece. Using a slightly old-fashioned German term, one might call the composer, clarinetist, conductor, and professor a Tausendsassa, or jack-of-all-trades: a charismatic artist who makes everything he undertakes look easy, whose enthusiasm and energy are infectious, but who takes each and every task very seriously, attending to it with both responsibility and affection—despite his busy schedule. The music journalist Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich aptly referred to his “warm-hearted intellectual aura.” Heart and reason, Widmann says, are inseparable in his dialectic ideal.

Among his many activities, his work with students has been a stroke of fortune that enriches his life, declares Jörg Widmann, who has held the Edward W. Said chair of composition at the BarenboimSaid Akademie since 2017, but has been teaching as a professor since he was 28. “Teaching has taught me a lot,” he says. “Here at the Akademie, I am particularly happy because I often have guests in my classes: not only composers, but also instrumentalists. Of course, that has a lot to do with the special spirit of this place, its openmindedness and intellectual curiosity.”

For tonight’s performance, Widmann has devised a birthday concert with the Boulez Ensemble, which traditionally includes students and alumni of the Barenboim-Said Akademie—appearing himself not only as conductor, but also as a soloist: “It was important to me to introduce different combinations of instruments in this program, from solos to larger ensemble works.”

The concert opens with Liebeslied (Love Song) for eight instruments. The title is somewhat misleading, Widmann admits: “It should really be called ‘Liebesleid’ (love’s pain), since there’s very little room in this piece for what is generally associated with ‘love.’” The ensemble work was written in 2010 as a companion piece to the orchestral work Teufel Amor (Cupid the Devil), conceived around the same time, whose title refers to a short poetic fragment by Schiller: “Süsser Amor, verweile / Im melodischen Flug.” (Sweet Cupid, stay awhile / In melodious flight.) These musical lines inspired Widmann: “That’s an impossible contradiction, staying and flying!” This basic idea—even without any specific verbal reference —is at the heart of Liebeslied, to its very last measures: the suspended final notes, “rising like a bird into the air,” leave the ending open. “There is at least the possibility of a union,” says the composer, who nonetheless calls Liebeslied a “brutal piece.” It shares its musical material with Teufel Amor, but where in the latter work lines are sung, they are fragmented and shattered in its companion piece. The broken, painful element seems ruthlessly exposed in this music: through shrill cries in the highest register, through notes that are played harshly and then immediately break off, through snapping or “nasty scratching sounds.” Yet there are also small moments of bliss: lyrical islands in the woodwinds that are offset by scurrying tremolos in the strings; dreamy, pensive fragments of melody; or arpeggios that seem to take wing. Contrasting instructions to the performers—such as “screaming, ugly multiphonic” and “compressed, constant, yet calm and ‘beautiful’ sound”—illustrate the polar extremes. But this hesitant blossoming of beauty remains suppressed—as in the strings’ use of iron mutes, for instance—even provoking violent reactions. One last lyrical protestation ends in another brief cry.

His solo works “resist the notion that a wind instrument can only play one line at a time,” says Jörg Widmann. Air, therefore, adds another instrument to the solo horn, which, however, only plays a passive role: an open grand piano, its pedal held down by a wedge, forms a mysterious, resonant backdrop for the sound of the horn. Unison is abolished: “Ideally, a veritable wave of sound reaches the player and the audience,” Widmann explains. Notes that are sung and played simultaneously open up another sonic space.

Conceptually, the piece also aims for polyphony: he imagined eight or nine horns and an alphorn, all in natural tuning, the composer reveals: “And one horn player must play them all!” Widmann admires “the horn’s ability to create a legato sound,” to which the title also alludes: Air refers both to physical air as well as a songful, melodious piece. The composition makes ample use of the horn’s technical peculiarities and its natural harmonic series—which always sounds a bit “out of tune” to modern ears—as well as alternating open and muted sound production. This also hearkens back to the instrument’s traditional role: signals and echo effects evoke the close association between horn and nature, as an instrument intended to be played in the open. Widmann describes Air as a “nature piece about proximity and distance.” While he was writing it, he consulted the Swiss horn player Bruno Schneider regarding the sophisticated playing techniques he employed; the piece is dedicated to Schneider. Commissioned in 2005 for the ARD Competition, it has quickly become part of the solo horn repertoire.

With his Quintet for Oboe, Clarinet, Horn, Bassoon, and Piano, Jörg Widmann refers back to Mozart and his Quintet K. 452 for the same combination of instruments, which he admires greatly— and which Mozart himself called “the best I have yet written in my life,” as he wrote to his father. Widmann describes it as “complex and simple at the same time,” particularly emphasizing the score’s harmonic daring.

Formally, Widmann’s Quintet, which was inspired in part by the constant exchange between Widmann and its dedicatee, the oboist, composer, and conductor Heinz Holliger, differs from Mozart: the piece consists of a sequence of 18 miniatures, some of them bearing poetic and atmospheric titles, others inscribed with theoretical musical terms: “Verwunschener Garten” (Enchanted Garden) or “Falsche Fährte” (False Trail, or Red Herring) create a web of associations, while “Kontrapunktische Studie” (Contrapuntal Study) or “Akkord-Etüde” (Chordal Etude) consciously appeal to musical craftsmanship, and titles such as “Choral” (Chorale) or “Verlorener Walzer” (Lost Waltz) allude to certain historical forms. Widmann considers mastery of technique and craftsmanship an essential precondition of artistic creation: “You have to discipline yourself to attain depth. At the end of the day, rigor has given me greater freedom,” he says. His teacher Hans Werner Henze kept urging him to study counterpoint: “Today I understand that he meant to sharpen my awareness of linear structure, and thereby ultimately of melody.” At the time the Quintet was written, commissioned by the Berliner Philharmoniker for its orchestra academy in 2006 and premiered as part of the award ceremony for the Claudio Abbado Prize, Widmann was exploring contrapuntal issues in some depth. The resulting work, however, betrays no evidence of arid academic tinkering: Widmann expressly describes the miniatures as “humoristic and romantic.”

The final movement, “Flugtraum” (Dream of/while Flying), once again recurs to the image of a melodic trajectory: the celesta gently lays the foundations for the ethereal lines of the winds, before wafting heavenward alone—in the composer’s words, “earthbound gravity evaporates.”

At the age of 19, Jörg Widmann composed a Fantasie for his own instrument, the clarinet—“one of the very few pieces from that time I haven’t withdrawn,” he says. Fortunately, one might add, for Fantasie has long entered the solo clarinet repertoire as a modern classic. For young students, this highly virtuosic work has become a milestone: “It does make me happy to have created something lasting for my instrument,” Widmann declares. Even after 30 years in the music business, he has retained his enjoyment of pure musicmaking: “a subversive, childlike joy,” he calls it. Fantasie alludes to role models such as Igor Stravinsky and Carl Maria von Weber, alongside fragments of jazz, klezmer, and Alpine folklore. All these contrasts clash within a very small space. Adopting distinctive gestures and visual imagination, the soloist is supposed to slip into characters of commedia dell’arte, an idea underlined further by performance instructions such as “grotesque, comical.”

Widmann describes the piece’s very beginning as a “double provocation” committed by a carefree young composer: it is a multiphonic that is technically difficult to execute and even includes tonal references, consisting of four notes, or more specifically, a dominant seventh chord. At the end of the piece, a daring somersault closes the curtain on this “little imaginary scene.” Whenever he works on it with students, Widmann makes a point of actually demanding fantasie (imagination) from them, to allow them the greatest possible liberties. Tonight, he performs the work himself. After so many years, does he still get stage fright? “I’m with Miles Davis on that: if you’re not nervous, it only means you’re not focused enough.”

Freie Stücke (Free Pieces, but also Free Will) for ensemble is scored for nine winds, five strings, and two percussionists. Widmann wrote his “first proper ensemble piece” in 2002, dedicating it to his teacher Wolfgang Rihm—whose 50th birthday it was at the time. As an attempt at “positioning” himself after completing his studies, to Widmann it is a central piece of this time when he was trying to consolidate his own musical language. Each of the ten individual pieces, which were premiered by Ensemble Modern at the Cologne Philharmonie in 2002, explores a distinct sonic idea, including “pulse, shifting grounds, noise, unison, overtone structures, etc.,” as the composer explains in his preface to the score. Concentration and reduction are paramount throughout. “I was quite aware of the danger of going off on individual tangents,” Widmann recalls. “So I asked myself what held the whole thing together. The final note of each piece is reflected in the first one of the following.” Thus, the audience experiences a resounding continuum, an almost unbroken narrative stream.

Extended playing techniques, such as “tongue rams” (where the mouthpiece is abruptly blocked by the tongue), air and key noises, or hitting the mouthpiece with the palm of one’s hand, expand the spectrum of a sound world that keeps reinventing itself. In the first piece, flageolets and whistle tones suggest that the performer (or the listener) is looking at it from a spheric distance before conquering it through concerted, slow, and tentative forward movement.

Shadowy sounds are produced by the wind players changing the “air color,” leading to extreme differentiation, while the strings play their notes simultaneously in pizzicato and with sautillé bowing. It is often impossible to tell which instrument is actually producing these fantastical sounds. From brief “morse signals” to hard, percussive outbursts, to dreamy floating—Widmann’s picturesque, expressive imagination seems boundless. Once again, the final measures lead us into the open: the colorful resonance of the crotales played with a bow loses itself in space. Widmann’s intention, he explains, was to open up a utopian perspective: the sound merges with something “we ourselves do not know.”

Translation: Alexa Nieschlag

Dr. Kerstin Schüssler-Bach has worked as an opera and concert dramaturg in Cologne, Essen, and Hamburg and taught at the Hamburg Musikhochschule and at Cologne University. She is currently Head of Composer Management for the music publishers Boosey & Hawkes in Berlin. She regularly writes program notes for the Berliner Philharmoniker, Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, the Lucerne Festival, and Leipzig’s Gewandhaus Orchestra. Her book on conductor Simone Young was published in 2022.