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Peter Ruzicka |
[01] CLOUDS 2 for String Quartet and Orchestra (2013) 19:22 [02–09] “…POSSIBLE-À-CHAQUE-INSTANT” String Quartet No. 7 (2016) 41:57
Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin
THE HORIZON OF POSSIBILITY CLOUDS 2 Peter Ruzicka was commissioned to compose CLOUDS by the German broadcaster Hessischer Rundfunk for the 2012 Rheingau Festival. After the premiere performance, he revised the score, creating an extended version entitled CLOUDS 2. The newly composed second movement assigns the string quartet a substantially more pronounced role, which, in opposition to the orchestra, weaves a second level into the tonal architecture of the work. He briefly considered naming the piece “Der ferne Klang” (The Distant Sound), but he felt this title was taken once and for all by Franz Schreker’s opera. The image that his music was in search of a sound, which he himself had never heard before, and which had never before appeared in one of his works. The work takes place as an approach with interjections, with tonal figures, which, much like in staged pieces, were given a dramatic function. They seem like clouds, which conceal and envelope the sound being sought, allowing its contours to shine through, blur or disappear. The piece emerges from silence, softly, just barely discernible. The string quartet enters with static and flat sounds in the highest range. The orchestral strings come in with a glassy, bell-like sound, growing louder and louder each time. The quartet stays separate from the larger ensemble, even moving in independent time sequences so that “at times the impression of ‘commentary’ on a second level” can be felt (Peter Ruzicka). – The first movement of CLOUDS ends in silence, again on the edges of the discernible, but only in the low bass, in sounds allowing the overtone range heard before to resonate again. It is that “distant sound,” which never completely reveals itself. – In the middle section the strings had begun an extremely rapid figure to an aggressive outburst by the orchestra in the “breathing pauses” of which the mysterious sound shines through. But what is this “distant sound”? “Sound” can mean different things: a single chord, but also the atmosphere of an entire piece. The way Ruzicka understands it in CLOUDS, reveals itself the most clearly directly before the apocalyptic orchestral outburst in the middle of the first movement. A series of chords with frayed edges can be heard in the winds section, underpinned by the percussion. They flow into each other, as if they have come from afar. These are tonal elements which are removed from their traditional logic, with a grammatical order replaced by a flowing pictorial order. Historically, the sound comes from a time when the traditional system of “proper” chord progressions lost their binding force and the sounds – according to Schoenberg – unfolded as an “instinctual life” which composing must retrace. This time is about a century ago, their “tonal pedigree” was addressed in two musicoliterary works: in Franz Schreker’s opera Der ferne Klang (The Distant Sound), which was first premiered in 1912, and in the Thomas Mann novel Doktor Faustus, whose pivotal chapter of the pact with the devil entered into by composer Adrian Leverkühn, which the writer says was written around 1911 or 1912. Only towards the end of his life can the protagonist in Schreker’s opera, also a composer, solve the puzzle of the unheard sound he had striven towards all his life. Ruzicka makes reference to the opera about artists by not completely deciphering his “distant sound.” With him at the most prominent point in the score, it consists of four components: a D-minor triad derived from the layering of whole-step notes and their glowing colors, from a chord, which traditionally sounds at the penultimate position but projects a transitory beauty of its own, and the traditional but by now long hackneyed “Schreckensakkord” (chord of terror). Their melded sound can have a very different emotional effect depending on whether they are in the background or foreground. The “distant sound” is a complex structure, as the first station on the way to that sound Ruzicka notes the interval which went down in history as the “diabolus in musica” and which the main character in Thomas Mann’s novel ponders in many ways.
Paul Valéry once reflected on this idea: “It would perhaps be interesting to create a work one day which, at each of its nodal junctures, would show how disparate things could present themselves to the creative imagination at that juncture before it chooses one single result which is then found in the text. In other words: rather than the illusion of a single destiny that imitates reality, having that which is ‘possible at any moment’ (possible-à-chaque-instant) take its place instead.” Peter Ruzicka made this latter idea the foundation of this String Quartet No. 7 and remarks: “This kind of reflective observation allowed the genesis of Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 131, a singular work that continuously points to a “horizon of the possible” . I avoid obvious continuities in my Seventh String Quartet and, using the form of the possible, speak of ‘fragments lying in the future’ at many points.” Ruzicka often had “a personal compositional experience” in mind, “which does not aim at the totality of the composition but instead reflects its unfolding as a process.” But what is it, this form of the possible in music? Ruzicka commented about the opening bar of the score: “Absolute external and internal silence. ‘Dal niente’, as if this music had always been there…” – since his early works, this performance instruction for preparing oneself mentally has been used by Ruzicka. Fleeting, shadowy figures appear on the verge of what is tonally perceptible, wrapped around a single note, with a small downward leap, fragments of a music which “is there”, but does not become perceptible in context. Whence have they come, whither do they go? Does the listener hear figures against something concealed, or scattered passages not yet revealing why they are agitated? The first phase of the String Quartet can be perceived as observations about what conceivable pathways are envisaged in the constellation of individual events, including those cloaked in silence. There is no clearly evident “solution” for the interaction of moments, which repeat with slight variations, pull their constellation more tightly together, bend into inert or directed movement, usually remaining soft, but also knowing forceful attacks. Until a figure plummets with full force into the fragile scene, once, twice, then three times in succession. With this figure, two further aspects of the musical form of the possible assert themselves: on the one hand the disruption, the sudden entry of something else, something foreign, unanticipated (while also not entirely unannounced). Overtones of Beethoven are felt: The brusque contrast between continuity and discontinuity is a prominent feature of his C minor String Quartet. On the other hand, the external relationships of the work are developed thematically. For the striking figure comes from an earlier work by Ruzicka, from String Quartet No. 5 STURZ; the figure reappears here more intensively. A musical idea carries on even if it was already made a part of one work, develops and transforms, creating a story of its own. This is included as a possibility each time it appears. The same is similarly true for all passages within the work of over 30 minutes, which, among others, Ruzicka characterizes with the word “lontano” (at a distance), calm, cantabile sections of uncanny beauty, forming a countercurrent to the movements and harsh sounds, from which they are at times catapulted, also as forces the whirring passages and their raging eruptions, which culminate in almost percussive chord repetitions. The calm phases open up a horizon of possibilities, in particular because they arouse more or less defined memories. This horizon is extended at the end, the reality of sounding tones approaches stillness – with gentle tones and figures emanating not only from the string instruments. Habakuk Traber |
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