Helmut Lachenmann: Das Mädchen mit Schwefelhölzern - Tokyo-Fassung 2000

“Not only is ‘The Little Match Girl’ by far the biggest work of one of Europe’s most esteemed composers, but it magnifies the qualities of strangeness and intensity, of huge but frustrated power, that have given him his reputation” – Paul Griffiths, The New York Times

Helmut Lachenmann’s “Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern” defies almost all operatic conventions and counts nonetheless (or therefore) as one of the great achievements of contemporary opera – even if the composer himself prefers the term ‘music with images’.
“If opera is to remain a living art form”, wrote Larry Lash in Andante, “it must grow beyond the boundaries of what one commonly thinks of as ‘opera’. Lachenmann gave this particular envelope a major push with ‘Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern’ … There is only the barest framework of narrative… ‘Das Mädchen’ challenges our preconceptions of what constitutes opera.”
Relentless in its determination to reveal new colours to the listener, “Das Mädchen” is a great sustained work of invention that has an impact on many levels. As the New York Times, in citing Lachenmann as the most influential European composer, wrote: “The best of his work takes you by the hand, and will not let go until it has shown you things you could not have suspected.”

In the case of the opera, the unsuspected includes not only the sonic poetry of Lachenmann’s instrumental resources, but a landscape of text, from sources that at first appear disparate, in which the music is set.

Three textual components are interwoven. The first is Hans Christian Andersen’s classic tale of the Little Match Girl who freezes to death on New Year’s Eve. Lachenmann: “It’s the perfect fairytale, such a sad and serene story – this little girl, just trying to live, who sees a vision in the light of her matches and then dies. It’s much more provocative than a story that starts out ‘to make a better world.’” The second text element is comprised of writings by Gudrun Ensslin, a childhood acquaintance of Lachenmann’s who grew up to be a Red Army Faction terrorist and died in prison at the age of 37 (opinions still differ on whether she was murdered or took her own life). The third text component is from Leonard Da Vinci’s treatise “The Desire for Knowledge”.

The opera is not a work that admits of a single “meaning”, its plotline is multiple and diffuse, but an undercurrent of social criticism is implied as Lachenmann views the pauper, the terrorist and the visionary artist all as outsiders, figures on the fringes of society, variously driven to the margins by circumstances and by society’s coldness, there to play with fire in highly individual ways. Coldness, figuratively and literally, is one of the opera’s conceptual themes. Burning desire, and extreme cold, as attitudes and conditions, counterpoint each other in the music. The action evolves through the suggestibility of the sounds which Lachenmann deploys like no one else.

Helmut Lachenmann: “My opera focuses on Andersen’s little girl. But the archetype of being made an outsider that merges with this fairytale figure, who by helping herself destroys herself, includes for me the ‘criminal, mad suicide’ evoked in Gudrun Ensslin’s letters. She was perhaps referring to herself in a visionary way. In a totally different light there is also the one driven by burning desire, referred to in another text, by Leonardo da Vinci, when he speaks of being fearful and desirous before the dark cave, wondering what might be inside. For me the Leonardo text and the Ensslin text complement each other and at the same time preserve the Andersen fairy tale from being merely harmless and noncommittal poetry.”

The ECM concertante recording of the opera is considered by Lachenmann to be authoritative. It features the so-called “Tokyo version” of the work, which tightened the section called “‘…zwei Gefühle…’, Musik mit Leonardo”, originally in response to a Japanese staging. Helmut Lachenmann: “I consider my surgical intervention – as documented on this CD – beneficial to the overall comprehensibility of the work and, dialectically speaking, to its complexity.” Recorded under studio conditions in Freiburg, the immense sensitivity with which Lachenmann works with his materials can be fully grasped in this recording.

“Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern” received its first performance in Hamburg in January 1997. This was followed by performances in Tokyo, Stuttgart, Paris, Salzburg, Berlin, Frankfurt and Vienna. In September 2004, the work returns to Stuttgart, the city of Lachenmann’s birth, for further performances.