Heiner Goebbels Playbill: "Stifters Dinge" + "Songs of Wars I Have Seen"

HEINER GOEBBELS

September 7–9

2018

SCHEDULE HEINER GOEBBELS Performative Installation Sept 7 at 8pm (VIP Reception) + 10:30pm Sept 8 at 8pm + 10:30pm Sept 9 at 6 pm + 8:30pm The Navy Yard, Building 611 1120 Flagship Drive Wheelchair accessible FringeArts.com/8001

HEINER GOEBBELS Music / Theater Performed by members of the Philadelphia Orchestra and Tempesta di Mare Sept 7 + 8 at 8 pm FringeArts 140 North Columbus Boulevard Wheelchair accessible FringeArts.com/8002

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Stifters Dinge and Songs of Wars I Have Seen have been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

ESSAY: HEINER GOEBBELS IN AMERICA

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STIFTERS DINGE

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ESSAY: STIFTER’S THINGS, STIFTER’S MODERNITY

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SONGS OF WARS I HAVE SEEN

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ABOUT THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA

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ABOUT TEMPESTA DI MARE

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ESSAY: WARS I HAVE SEEN BY GERTRUDE STEIN

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INTERVIEW WITH HEINER GOEBBELS

HEINER GOEBBELS IN AMERICA

BY GELSEY BELL

composer Mauricio Kagel, whose Zwei Mann Orchester (“two man orchestra”) was the centerpiece of Bowerbird’s Sound Machines exhibition last spring at Drexel University’s Pearlstein Gallery.

“That makes a sound that gently sings that gently sounds but sounds as sounds. It sounds as sounds of course as words but it sounds as sounds. It sounds as sounds that is to say as birds as well as word. And that is because the words are there, they are not chosen as words, they are already there.”

– Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America

Goebbels’ practice is also aligned with an array of twentieth and twenty-first century American artists, such as John Cage, Richard Foreman, Meredith Monk, Robert Wilson, Alvin Lucier, and the Wooster Group as well as a younger generation of artists like Rick Burkhardt, Object Collection, and even my own thingNY and Varispeed. Since the 1960s, with the burgeoning of the Fluxus movement, performance art, and Cage’s declaration that all music performance was inherently theatrical, the US has continuously produced artists that live in the productive crossroads of artistic disciplines.

Goebbels kinship to these artists is obvious in his aesthetics and practices.

Goebbels has worked with many such Americans–for instance, Don Cherry, Fred Frith, Arto Lindsay, John King, David Moss, and George Lewis–as well as directing seminal works by American composers, namely Cage’s Europeras 1 & 2 and Harry Partch’s Delusion of the Fury. And though he has been bringing his work to the US since the 1980s, this is the first time it has been seen in Philadelphia.

Heiner Goebbels is not simply a composer of music, but a creator of experiences. His ideas are 4D–time and space, ears and eyes–and his works illustrate a staged art that springs equally from the sonic, the visual, the literary, and the philosophical.

His material comes from many musical eras and genres–renaissance and contemporary, jazz and classical– text and sound recordings from an assortment of thinkers and writers, and a wide rainbow of timbres from standard orchestral instruments and electronics to repurposed industrialized pipes, sheet metal, water, and weathered (prepared) pianos played by mechanical means.

One can place Goebbels’ work along an illustrious lineage of German composer/dramatists from Hildegard von Bingen in the twelfth century, one of Europe’s earliest composers and the composer and playwright of the first morality play, to Richard Wagner in the nineteenth century, whose attention to the stagecraft of his operas led to the influential redesign of theater architecture and the practice of dimming the lights over the audience, not to mention his theory of Gesamtkunstwerk –translating to something like “total art work” and signifying the synthesis of artistic disciplines. One can trace even more of an aesthetic kinship between Goebbels and German-Argentine

Goebbels’ work is distinctively postdramatic–meaning he is not interested in the logic of representation or linear storytelling. He leaves the conventional drama of comedy and tragedy peopled with protagonists and villains behind, in order to build an aesthetic that investigates the audience’s perception of the real people and things inhabiting the theater space or concert hall. He embraces the inherent theatricality of music 4

performance, paying equal attention to the visual content of his staged concert works as the sonic content. And he devises his works with a keen eye (and ear) on the individual qualities of his performers, or, in the case of Stifters Dinge, materials like metal, stone, and water. His works are not constructed to deliver a single concentrated message to the audience, or to be condensed easily into meaning. Instead he creates collections of musico-theatrical events that invite the audience to thoughtfully experience and weave their own individual reactions into meaning.

inspired the piece’s focus on natural materials and the absence of human actors. Working closely with set and lighting designer Klaus Grünberg, Goebbels created the work “from an experimental desire to develop something on stage which we cannot use as a mirror–this is a crucial point that increasingly interests me about theatre. We identify with a character; and we finally recognize what we have in common with it–or what divides us from it. […] Instead I wanted to assemble things on stage that remain strange to us.”1 Stifters Dinge invites the audience to perform the part of the human in perceiving and contemplating the logics of nature on stage.

Not only does he cull his music from an array of genres and methodologies, but he also employs a variety of languages, facilitating his works touring outside of Germany. In both Stifters Dinge and Songs of Wars I Have Seen, American voices figure prominently. In the former, the recorded voices of Malcolm X and William S. Burroughs (alongside ethnographic recordings as far flung as Papua New Guinea, Colombia, and Greece, and an interview with anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss) ornament the landscape of musical objects. In the latter, ex-pat Gertrude Stein’s account of Vichy France during WWII is read aloud by female members of the orchestra in moments between, and sometimes while, playing their instruments.

Songs of Wars I Have Seen, also from 2007, draws on the writing of Gertrude Stein living in a small village outside of Lyon during WWII while in her late 60s. The text is spread throughout the female members of the orchestra who are seated amongst various different lamps that light the stage with a domestic glow. The instrumentalists take turns reading different excerpts out loud, like mothers reading stories to their children at bedtime. Stein’s writing folds the mundanity and the extraordinary perils of war in dizzying spirals, while the musical score supports and punctuates the rhythms of speech. Stein’s words performed by the individual instrumentalists begin to imply a collective voice, reflected in both the structure and the music-making of the orchestra.

Stifters Dinge, perhaps his most widely traveled work, has been on tour since it premiered in 2007. The title translates to Stifter’s Things, named for Adalbert Stifter, a 19th-century Austrian writer not well known outside of the Germanspeaking world, whose detailed observations of natural landscapes

Goebbels, Heiner. 2015. Aesthetics of Absence: Texts on Theatre. London: Routledge, p. 32.

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Gelsey Bell is a singer, songwriter, sound artist, and scholar. She recently received a music/sound award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, has had work included in PS1’s Greater New York exhibit, and has had both a commission and a residency from Roulette in Brooklyn. Her installation “Hakim’s Tale” (made with Philadelphia-based artist Erik Ruin) is currently on exhibit at the Eastern State Penitentiary. She has a PhD in Performance Studies and is currently completing a book on American experimental vocal music in the 1970s. She is the Co-Critical Acts Editor for TDR/The Drama Review and an Associate Editor for the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies. www.gelseybell.com 5

“What if actors stood aside and let props steal the show?” The Guardian Stifters Dinge (“Stifter’s things”) is a play with no actors, a composition for five pianos with no pianists, a performance without performers –a no-man show. Light, pictures, murmurs, sounds, voices, wind and mist, water and ice–these devices usually act as mere props or set pieces, but in Stifters Dinge they become protagonists.

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“The audience is at the center of this piece — they make sense of what they see and what they hear, in a liberated and individualized way.” Heiner Goebbels

Writing in the early 19th century, Bohemian author Adalbert Stifter focused his attention on non-human forces, natural phenomena and “things” we don’t really know how to name and explain. In a large-scale performative installation, worldrenowned composer Heiner Goebbels decelerates our sense of time to bring “Stifter’s things” to the forefront of our awareness. Evocative recordings

by William S. Burroughs, Malcolm X, and Claude Lévi-Strauss whisper throughout Goebbels’ soundscape, emphasizing the political implications of this newfound meditative space.

Conception, music & direction Heiner Goebbels Set design, light & video Klaus Grünberg Musical collaboration/programming & musical supervision Hubert Machnik Sound design Willi Bopp Artistic collaboration & musical supervision Matthias Mohr Stage Manager Nicolas Pilet Light technician Roby Carruba, Mattias Bovard Video Jérôme Vernez Stéphane Janvier, René Liebert Robotics Thierry Kaltenrieder Sound Ludovic Guglielmazzi Assistant stage manager Jean-Daniel Buri, Fabio Gaggetta Tour Manager Sylvain Didry Produced by Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne.

Festival Co-Producers: Lynne & Bertram Strieb Stifters Dinge has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

Produced by Théâtre de Vidy.

Co-produced by spielzeit’europa, Berliner Festspiele, Grand Théâtre de la Ville de Luxembourg, schauspielfrankfurt, T&M-Théâtre de Gennevilliers/CDN, Pour-cent culturel Migros and Teatro Stabile di Torino. Corealised by Artangel London. With the support of Pro Helvetia - Fondation suisse pour la culture.

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STIFTER’S THINGS, STIFTER’S MODERNITY

BY CATRIONA MACLEOD “The sensationalism of boredom.”

This was how Thomas Mann, more receptive to Adalbert Stifter (180568) and his experimental form than Stifter’s often caustic contemporaries, characterized the glacial prose of the nineteenth-century Austrian authorartist who inspired his own modernist works. A major figure in German Poetic Realism, Stifter is known for his numerous novellas, among them the collection Bunte Steine (Colored Stones, 1853) and for the novels Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer, 1857) and Witiko (1865-67).

years, his literary sensibility is imbued with a sense of the natural world and anchored in the Bohemian landscape, which provides the setting for most of his works. In declining health from 1863 onwards (suffering from cirrhosis of the liver), Stifter died in Linz in a suicide of shocking violence: a self-inflicted razor wound to the throat claimed his life on 28 January 1868. Stifter’s life and work seem incongruous. On the one hand, Stifter is the placid (if not reactionary) school inspector who loved his creature comforts, the dog-lover, antiques collector, cactus-fancier, pipe smoker, gourmand. He hardly traveled outside Austria, and only saw the sea once, already a middle-aged man, in 1857. On the other hand, he is the introspective and melancholic critic of the industrial age, author of stylistically experimental works that, while striving to temper modernity and its fracturing effects, cannot help but register the fragility of the world. Nature too exerts an ambivalent force: it figures as place of pre-modern security, but is also a source of terror.

Stifter was born in humble circumstances in the tiny market town of Oberplan (today the Czech town of Horni-Planá), the eldest child of a family of linen weavers and merchants. His father Johann, who died when Stifter was twelve when his cart overturned and crushed him, had suffered the devastating impact British factory production had on the rural Austrian textile economy. Adalbert Stifter’s adult life, permanently torn between art and financial necessity, was divided into two periods: two decades spent in Vienna, where he failed to complete a law degree and became agitated and politically disillusioned by the 1848 Revolution, and two decades in the provincial town of Linz, fifty miles from his birthplace, where he settled into a career as a school administrator.

Long after he was a published author he viewed himself as a landscape artist first and foremost, and an 1847 Viennese art lexicon still listed him under that heading. Although he lived in Vienna for a little over twenty

Stifter’s are challenging, even hostile narratives that are emptied out of conventional plot elements and human actors, and instead are filled with icily spare, repetitive descriptions, and a fixation on things. As Heiner Goebbels remarks in his essay on Stifters Dinge as a “theater of deceleration,” what bored him to tears as a schoolboy being forced to read Stifter is also what produces a heightened awareness of time and things. Goebbels alludes in his work’s title to Stifter’s “respect for Things,” a phrase he has borrowed 8

from Stifter’s novel Der Nachsommer, which is also given voice elsewhere in the performance – though Goebbels rejects the notion that this is a direct staging or setting to music of any of Stifter’s works. He shares Stifter’s dual preoccupations with things and tempo.

Statues, protagonists of Stifter’s novel, contribute to the sclerotic halting of time, according to eighteenth-century distinctions between poetry as a medium of time and mobility, and visual art as a medium of space and stasis.

essence, so that they could become again what they once had been, so that what had been taken from them would be restored, without which they cannot be, what they are.”

Restoring what the thing has lost, returning the thing to its original condition. Why are these Risach’s life goals? What do they tell us about the status of the thing in the mid nineteenth century? Contemporary thing theorist Bill Brown points to that age of capitalism and commodification, and remarks that objects become things testing the human world when they cease to work for us, now disorderly and unintelligible: “When the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the window gets filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition has been arrested, however momentarily.”

Stifter’s bildungsroman without a plot (the boringly expectable marriage of the hero is spun out until the final pages of the massively long novel) turns instead around the collection and curation of slow-growing plants (roses, cacti) and objects including fossils, paintings, medieval church fixtures, as well as, most importantly, sculpture. The aristocratic estate where this activity occurs, the Asperhof, is secluded geographically from metropolitan Vienna and events on the wider world stage. Stifter pointedly sets the novel, albeit vaguely, at least a generation earlier, before the full onslaught of the industrial age in Germany and Austria, evincing a nostalgia that is relevant for its concern with the fate of things.

If Goebbels’ work places on the stage, not human performers, but a machinesculpture as a protagonist, Stifter’s novel also has as its core an antique sculpture, a thing with a particular relation to modernity, and an outof-place relic of eighteenth-century neoclassical aesthetics. Where does this statue come from, and what is it doing at the Asperhof? It is, importantly, a sculpture that has been on the move and that has been degraded.

Risach discovers it in Italy, but not in a museum or aristocratic collection.

Instead, it is hidden in a builders’ hut cluttered with construction equipment on an untidy market square, where it is subject to the rowdy ball games of local children. The old Italian woman who makes the sale to the Austrian collector is no curator or art dealer, but an entrepreneur intent on converting the site into a tourist trap, a profitable destination for travelers on the Grand Tour. At first, Risach, peeping voyeuristically through the wooden

It is worthwhile to examine the dialog in which the comment on reverence or respect for things is uttered. Baron von Risach, the owner of the estate, is explaining to his young protégé Heinrich Drendorf his retreat from a prestigious career as a financier in the public eye: “The reverence for things, how they are in themselves, was so important to me that when it came to intrigue, to contentious situations, to the necessity to bring order to affairs, I did not concern myself with what was to our own benefit; rather, I asked what the things demanded for themselves and what was appropriate to their own 9

boards, believes this to be a plaster bust, and hence a reproduction. Having stripped away the wood and realized that this is a full figure statue of a woman, he conducts a two-fold rescue mission: he brings the statue back to the Asperhof where he is astonished to discover, during the protracted work of cleaning that occupies many pages in the novel, that the plaster, too, is a protective shell covering over an antique Greek marble statue. With this restoration, Risach is ostensibly reenchanting the thing, rescuing it from capitalist commodification. (A second marble statue at the Asperhof, of a nymph, is also safeguarded from the open market, as its sale to dealers is prohibited according to the terms of its owner’s will.) Paradoxically, the sculpture first has to be made portable, has to be uprooted from its dwelling in Italy. Risach’s gentlemanly antiquarian pursuits, it must be stressed, are only possible on the back of his lucrative capitalist career in finance. There are other complications around the rescue. Risach is not able to reconstruct any details about the sculpture’s iconography, date of composition, or creator – its origins and subject matter remain forever lost. Most problematically for the sculpture, the human touch he applies to this sculpted female body has none of the tenderness of Ovid’s sculptor Pygmalion (Pygmalion worries that

the touch of his fingers will bruise the ivory statue): in Stifter, the technical conservation process repeatedly refers to Risach’s aggressive (rather than reverential) application of knife and file, culminating in the buffing of the marble surface with wool cloths.

Further grooming and capturing this statue-thing, Risach places it on a rotating pedestal that enables his visual control and moves it to a secluded room carefully lit from above so as to minimize the shimmering animating effects of natural light on white marble, and to quarantine it from any visual contact with what Stifter’s narrator enigmatically calls “the everyday objects” outside. In this novel, sculptures are subject to transactions, uprooted, touched, their surfaces are probed and cut, and they are optically and architecturally controlled, but they also look back at humans, who in turn are converted one after the other into statue-like white figures by Stifter’s lapidary narrative.

Recall the narrator of Stifter’s “ice tale” who speaks in Stifters Dinge of the dual emotions – rapt amazement and fear – he experiences as he is frozen by the sight of the lone pine tree in the winter forest, much like the peasants visiting a museum who, according to Risach, are struck dumb upon seeing an unidentified statue and tiptoe past it fearing its awakening.

Catriona MacLeod is Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania. Much of her research and teaching focuses on the relationships between literature, the visual arts, and material culture in the nineteenth century. Author most recently of the book Fugitive Objects: Literature and Sculpture in the German Nineteenth Century, MacLeod is currently completing a new project that explores the proliferation of paper-cuts, collage, decoupage, and inkblots in German and Danish Romanticism. She has written extensively on Adalbert Stifter and description.

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FringeArts now has a MOBILE APP to help you navigate all the Fringe Festival shows, build your own schedule, and learn about artists. Check out our News and Social section of the FringeArts app to listen to our podcast, Happy Hour on the Fringe, which includes a conversation between Heiner Goebbels and FringeArts’ President and Producing Director, Nick Stuccio.

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A work of theater as much as one of music, Songs of Wars I Have Seen juxtaposes modern and period instruments, electronic atmospherics, Baroque compositions, modernist harmonies, and the haunting text of Gertrude Stein’s World War II memoir to create a bittersweet lament on war’s insidious effects.

Tales of war generally feature the voices of male soldiers or military leaders, but Songs of Wars I Have Seen puts the often-overlooked female experience of war at the

“The piece is uncannily moving, its emotional reach unexpectedly deep.”

The Sunday Times (UK)

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forefront. An American Jew living in the Nazi puppet state of Vichy, France, Stein detailed everyday life in a neutral, descriptive style, pausing as much on the food she ate as the atrocities engulfing Europe. Her memoir Wars I Have Seen tells us what is happening, without telling us how to feel about it. In Songs of Wars I Have Seen, Heiner Goebbels emphasizes this meditative neutrality and sharpens our focus on the gendered experience of war.

“When a tree is already being mentioned, you don’t also have to show it.”

Heiner Goebbels

Conducted by Estonian maestro Anu Tali, the staged concert sees performers from Philadelphia’s leading classical music groups–Philadelphia Orchestra and Baroque ensemble Tempesta di Mare–speak Stein’s words and play Goebbel’s compositions. Bridging centuries of music, the melodies range from jazzy bursts to plaintive moans, incorporating melancholic and violent segments by the 17th-Century English composer Matthew Locke. Musical styles may change, war remains.

Composer Heiner Goebbels Text by Gertrude Stein Conductor Anu Tali Performed by members of the Philadelphia Orchestra and Tempesta di Mare.

Songs of Wars I Have Seen has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

Festival Co-Producer: Lee van de Velde

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THE PHILADELPHIA

ORCHESTRA Founded in 1900, the Philadelphia Orchestra is among a select group of the oldest and most prestigious American symphony orchestras. Based at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, it performs over 130 concerts each year. Renowned for its distinctive sound, desired for its keen ability to capture the hearts and imaginations of audiences, and admired for an unrivaled legacy of “firsts� in music-making, The Philadelphia Orchestra remains one of the preeminent orchestras in the world.

Jonathan Blumenfeld, oboe Paul Demers, clarinet/bass clarinet David Bilger, principal trumpet Nitzan Haroz, principal trombone Julie Thayer, horn Angela Zator Nelson, percussion/associate principal timpani William Wozniak, percussion/timpani Elizabeth Hainen, principal harp Davyd Booth, keyboards

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TEMPESTA

DI MARE Conversational. Extroverted. Emotionally provocative. These words describe baroque music and the experience Tempesta di Mare delivers with every performance.

Baroque composers imbued their chamber and orchestral music with the powers of language, letting every listener experience as full a range of human emotion as from a play or poem. Tempesta crafts its performances to bring baroque music’s most speech-like and emotive qualities front and center. Whether as an orchestra or a chamber ensemble, its players transform the musical notes into dynamic, wordless dialogues in sound that win over audiences everywhere they play.

To experience Tempesta is to experience nonstop discovery of repertoire both in and outside the canon: groundbreaking, modern rediscoveries, essential music by forgotten composers, overlooked works by famous composers, and even famous works by famous composers reveal themselves in new ways.

Tempesta Di Mare Rebecca Harris, violin 1 Mandy Wolman, violin 2 Daniela Giulia Pierson, viola Eve S Miller, cello Heather Miller Lardin, bass Eve Friedman, flute

Anna Marsh, bassoon Paula Maust, harpsichord Reese Revak, piano Richard Stone, flute

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WARS I HAVE SEEN BY GERTRUDE STEIN BARBARA WILL In 1929, the American writer and modern art collector Gertrude Stein discovered the “house of [her] dreams” in the picturesque Bugey region of southeastern France. Ten years later, in September 1939, Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas fled to this house at the outbreak of the Second World War, carrying with them only a few household possessions and two priceless paintings, Pablo Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein and Paul Cézanne’s Madame Cezanne with a Fan. Their plan was to sit out the hostilities for a time and then return to Paris, to their beautiful apartment filled with a stunning modern art collection and a lifetime’s worth of unpublished manuscripts. In fact, it would be five long years before Stein and Toklas would make the journey from the Bugey back to Paris. On the return, they carried with them only one of the two paintings—they had sold the Cézanne in the middle of the war for much-needed cash—along with notes and drafts of a new memoir Stein had written during the war, Wars I Have Seen.

of Stein’s memoir is not personal vulnerability but the everyday ironies of daily life during wartime, the “funny” things that she encounters during her long walks to the market, the gossip and stories she shares with neighbors, and the survival tactics that allow her to get through another day. Stein had always been interested in the process of repetition and in what she called “daily living,” and this period offered her new insights into the peculiar rhythm of boredom and terror that punctuates everyday life during wartime: “It is a queer life one leads in a modern war, every day so much can happen and every day is just the same.”

The title of Stein’s memoir, Wars I Have Seen, pays homage to two distinct preoccupations. First, Stein’s investment in “seeing” as an intellectual and aesthetic practice. Dispassionate and ironic, Wars asks us to see war through the eyes of a participantobserver, one located both within and outside of the events happening around her. These are also the eyes of a connoisseur of modern art trained to withhold skepticism or judgment, and to keep both surface and depth at play. Her repeated use of the phrase “It is funny” (“It is very funny the way everybody and anybody can feel about anything”) places the war and its effects at a distance, as something bizarre and random, both inexplicable and unsettling. “It is funny why do the Germans wear camouflaged raincoats but not camouflaged uniforms now why do they,” Stein asks, turning a surface perception into a deeper question about the logic of war’s deathmachine. In perfecting the voice of the ironic spectator taking stock of the

Composed between 1943-44, Wars I Have Seen recounts Stein’s experience of daily life in a France occupied by the Nazis. American and Jewish, Stein and Toklas lived an unusually precarious existence during this period, especially given the omnipresence of German troops stationed in the small towns around them, as well as the homegrown French measures to arrest, intern, and deport Jews. Wars I Have Seen is curious in referencing this personal danger in only the most oblique way: through anecdotes about Jewish neighbors or general reflections on the scourge of anti-semitism. The dominant theme 16

“funniness” of war, Wars I Have Seen anticipates a new genre of war writing that would come to a head in the 1960s and finds its fullest expression in the biting satire of Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel Catch-22, with its irrational logic and comic inversions.

itself, sometimes it has worse attacks of it than at other times…but just now that is November 1943 it is just full of them full of repetitions of nothing but repetitions.”

Wars I Have Seen is a complex book, made more so by some of its less savory aspects, such as Stein’s support in its pages for the head of state of the collaborationist Vichy regime, Philippe Pétain—a man who had personally drafted legislation to suppress Jews and who, by 1943, was directly involved in suppressing the French Resistance. Yet Stein’s admiration for Pétain and his policies (“Pétain was right to stay in France and he was right to make the armistice…in the first place it was more comfortable for us who were here and in the second place it was an important element in the ultimate defeat of the Germans. To me it remained a miracle”) is balanced by accounts of personal affection for the maquis—French Resistance fighters targeted by Pétain’s milice—whom she describes at length in her book.

Stein’s memoir does not try to resolve this incongruity. Always changeable, “funny” in that way, Wars I Have Seen is a difficult text to grasp as a whole, but its contradictions, obliquities, and elusiveness make for a reading experience that continues to remain stimulating to this day.

Stein’s second concern in Wars I Have Seen is to locate the experience of World War II within the cyclical movement of history. This allows her to present her book as more than just a personal account of wartime experience told from the standpoint of a survivor. As a spectator of three wars—the Spanish-American war (1898), World War I (1914-1918), and World War II—Stein in Wars lays claim to heightened awareness of war as an inevitable and recurring fact of what it means to be alive. World War II is at once the event to be endured in the short term, and the return of something primordial that Stein and her contemporaries have experienced before.

Like the push-carts that suddenly appear on the streets in place of automobiles, war brings back to life a forgotten economy of human action and engagement, one that is, for Stein, familiar and not entirely unwelcome.

Conservative by nature, Stein finds the recurrence of wars over time strangely comforting: “It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat

Barbara Will is the A. and R. Newbury Professor of English and Associate Dean of the Arts and Humanities at Dartmouth College. She is the author of two books on Gertrude Stein, and numerous articles on literary and artistic modernism.

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An Interview with Heiner Goebbels How did you encounter Gertrude Stein’s writing?

HEINER GOEBBELS: The first experience I had with the meditative musicality of her prose was when Robert Wilson recited some paragraphs of her book The Making of Americans during the funeral service for German author Heiner MĂźller. It was a moving encounter with literature, which is so hard to describe: a novel, a poem, a litany, an incantation? And with other excerpts of this book I created my music theater work Hashirigaki in 2000.

What inspired you to adapt her memoir into Songs of Wars I Have Seen?

HEINER GOEBBELS: I got the idea to work with some of that text for my opera Landscape With Distant Relatives (2000), which I created in the context of 9/11, because of the difficulty and the inappropriateness of personal words when trying to talk about an experience of violence and disaster.

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Why did you choose to incorporate Matthew Locke’s score for the tempest in Songs of Wars I Have Seen?

HEINER GOEBBELS: Gertrude Stein has a cyclical concept of history. She says “history is repeating” and compares the wars of the 19th and 20th centuries with the violence in Shakespeare’s plays. So it was quite consequent to confront my music with music which was composed by Locke in the 17th century as a curtain tune for Shakespeare’s plays.

What connections do you see between Stifters Dinge and Songs of Wars I Have Seen?

HEINER GOEBBELS: What characterizes both pieces is the empowerment of the audience to make up their own mind. In Stifters Dinge because nobody is on stage to represent its center or meaning. In Songs of Wars I Have Seen because Gertrude Stein’s descriptions of her own experiences during World War II are very ambivalent: the way she combines political judgments with personal impressions is very irritating, since she speaks about sugar and honey with the same intensity as throwing bombs on the Italians. That is very disturbing, sometimes even full of humor. You have to make up your own mind about her words.

What kind of directions do you give to the musicians who speak the text?

HEINER GOEBBELS: Not much. I don’t want them to be too prepared, I don’t want the reader to be cleverer than the listener. But anyway, Stein’s Wars I Have Seen has this light everyday approach to speech, so it is better and more convincing if the reader has an untrained voice.

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HEINER GOEBBELS is a prolific German artist, composer, and director who has created compositions and theater works for ensembles and orchestras around the world. His work often defies easy characterization, using unconventional musical composition and theatrical staging to push the boundaries of contemporary performance art.

THIS YEAR’S will feature two of Goebbels’s pieces: STIFTERS DINGE, a performative installation with no actors, only machines, sounds, and whispers, and SONGS OF WARS I HAVE SEEN, a work of music theater featuring the Philadelphia Orchestra and Tempesta di Mare, with text from Gertrude Stein’s World War II memoir Wars I Have Seen, recited by the members of the orchestras. Stein’s text, which uses plain language to describe her own experience during the war is juxtaposed with orchestrations that span centuries of musical styles, performed on modern and period instruments.