Heiner Goebbels: Landschaft mit entfernten Verwandten

Heiner Goebbels’ work confronts, contrasts and combines elements from multiple sources, often provocatively. The task of describing it, however, he leaves to others: “With all my work I try to make this question difficult,” he advised UK newspaper The Scotsman. “What drives the attention of an audience is the unforeseeable, and the secrets and the mystery of a performance.” This is surely the case with ‘Landschaft mit entfernten Verwandten’ (Landscape with Distant Relatives), officially ‘an opera’ yet one which stretches conventional definitions. Its many layers of meaning yield themselves up to repeated listening; ideas arrive in swarms. If music-theatre was its original context this ‘soundtrack’ version of it is packed with fascinating detail, drawing the listener in. “The acoustic aspect has a life of its own,” says Heiner Goebbels.

The work was premiered at the Geneva Opera in October 2002 and was subsequently staged more than 20 times in Switzerland, France, Austria, the Netherlands, and Germany. The present recording is drawn from four performances at the Théâtre des Amandiers, Nanterre, Paris in October 2004.

Goebbels has often talked about exploring the ‘landscape’ of a text and the writers identified as distant relatives here include, alphabetically, Giordano Bruno, Arthur Chapman, T.S.Eliot, Henri Michaux, Nicolas Poussin, Gertrude Stein, Leonardo da Vinci. Literary form and structure – the textual architecture – are frequently as important to the composer as content, and when setting, for example, Gertrude Stein, he is alert to the musicality of her phrases, which imply rhythms, pulses, melodic patterns. The texts of Stein – all drawn from her 1945 book “Wars I Have Seen” – are of quite central importance here. In her unique style – at once ‘avant-garde’ and colloquial (and an enormous influence on contemporaries including Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson and Paul Bowles) – Stein gives insight into the unchanging nature of political conflict. As Goebbels told Gramophone, “the intriguing thing about Stein’s book is how she discusses important philosophical issues in a light way. The book is written like ‘gossip’, reminiscent of women talking over the fence. This allows the readers to discover their own focus, and my music does the same …” When Stein points to the parallels between political struggle in Shakespeare’s age and World War II, Goebbels has associative material for sound colour, allowing the sonorities of early music instruments to find their place inside his finely-focused post-modern sound structures. This associative connection is further underlined by texts from Leonardo da Vinci and Giordano Bruno, great imaginative minds of the 16th century. As Rob Cowan noted of the Geneva premiere, ‘Landschaft’ has discernible conceptual themes, “the ambiguous relationship between art and reality being one, and the nature of political conflict, another. The consistently gripping score runs the gamut of styles from Renaissance tonal tapestry (incorporating early instruments) to teeth-baring aggression –an army of drummers raising merry hell to sentiments aroused by T S Eliot’s ‘Coriolan’. Viscerally and intellectually exciting, the production is remarkable for its fluency and impact. But it is far from comfortable. By his own admission, Goebbels was deeply affected by September 11. Even in the face of multilingual crossfire, you sense the presence of colliding cultures”. This is an opera able to embrace Indian themes by Bollywood composer Allah Rakha Rahman and country & western campfire singalongs such as “Out Where the West Begins” alongside contemporary music of bracing energy and movement. Members of the Ensemble Modern, maintaining standards as contemporary music interpreters of the highest caliber, are also encouraged to improvise. (Goebbels has said that “about ten per cent” of “Landschaft mit Entfernten Verwandten” is improvised). The German Chamber Choir explores Goebbels’ chosen texts with flair.