The desert is the intellectual focal point of Beat Furrer’s new music theatre project which received its premiere at Theater Basel – the desert as a place of the completely alien, of not-being, of absence of memory, of death. Beat Furrer opens windows on this “placeless place”.
The desert – vanishing point and object of projection
Everything is present. The drama has already taken place. Since his music theatre piece Begehren (2003), Furrer has worked with dramatic concepts of simultaneity. The idea of a story compressed into a moment is composed musically in a complex matrix projected, as it were, into space and time, line figures and models of movements which are layered one on top of the other and retrieved or hidden through a filter. A poetic metaphor for this gave the title for Fama (2005): the image of the mythical figure, in whose house all the stories of the world resonate, is a metaphor for the composition, and formative for the construction of the musical narrative. With Wüstenbuch the simultaneity of all occurrences, one could also say, the eternal, which Beat Furrer composes in the overlaying of textual and tonal layers, is given a new visual presence. The desert is the symbol for everything which is not, a negative object of projection and equally a vanishing point.
In Wüstenbuch the story of a journy into the desert is composed of different layers of text: scenes from Ingeborg Bachmann’s fragment of the same name, combined with a text and scenario by Händl Klaus and further texts by Lucretius, Machado, Valente, Apuleius and from the Papyrus Berlin 3024. The starting points for Furrer’s work on Wüstenbuch were ancient Egyptian texts, brought to the composer’s attention by the Egyptologist Jan Assmann. Finally, the famous Papyrus Berlin 3024 is introduced into the composition, the “Dispute between a man and his Ba”. The worldly soul, Ba, which accompanies a person during his life and leaves him in death, has a dialogue with itself, reporting in the greatest despair of his loneliness, and reconciles it with the idea of death. The dialogue leads into a highly poetic vision of death as a homecoming. “Death stands before me today, as if a sick man recovers from illness ...” The question about death, which had the same significance for the Egyptians as forgetting, and about everything alien, is one layer of the composition. The fear of forgetting led to that advanced civilization whose monuments are still visible for us today – the realm of death, established by the Egyptians on the west side of the Nile.
In a bundle of papers entitled “Wüstenbuch”, Ingeborg Bachmann compiled scenes from a journey to Egypt in 1964 and planned to combine these with impressions from the wilderness of Berlin. In later versions, the experiences were always reworked, such as in a chapter entitled “Ägyptische Finsternis” (Egyptian darkness) from the fragment Der Fall Franza, and they are part of her major novel project Todesarten. In it, the “cases” of women are presented who are destroyed by their partners in an apparent protection of a marriage or a relationship. Bachmann travelled as a sick, disabled woman, humiliated and almost destroyed following her break up with Max Frisch. Her journey into the desert had the characteristics of a purification and return to life. This is documented in scenes such as her trip to Wadi Halfa in the Sudan, directly before the town was flooded for the Aswan Dam, where elementary experiences such as hunger, thirst and a silent meal with unknown kindly people made her aware of her vitality. But above all, her journey was an encounter with phantoms and victims: the exhibition of mummies in the Egyptian Museum perceived as desecration of corpses, the description of an insane woman who was pulled through the town by her own hair like an animal on a rope, the encounter with a phantom at the Black Sea: “Egypt is full of broken conceptions of God …”
Point of contact between this world and the hereafter
A further layer of Wüstenbuch is a libretto which has been created by Händl Klaus explicitly as a “Geröllhalde” (stone quarry) for Beat Furrer. The expressions take place, according to Händl Klaus, intellectually “on a membrane between this world and the hereafter”, perceived under increasing threat, danger, highly tense and in blazing heat. “At this point of contact between this world and the hereafter the outcome is unconditional communication – the soul has become ‘fundamental’, one has fallen into an ‘inflammable condition’. And as a result, the language of this feeling of the other side is driven to the ‘limits’, permeable.” The dialogues are a strongly rhythmicised interleaving of sentences or fragments of sentences. The speakers take the words from each other’s mouths. The sentences for the male voices are syntactically screwed together like formulated spirals of thought. The temperature of the texts is high, they speak of the danger of being wounded and of extreme feelings: “my face is sore, my mouth no longer opens ...” (Scene VIII).
“On the search for the alien, which actually no longer exists,” is how Beat Furrer summarizes the theme of Wüstenbuch. “The neighbour is the stranger who lives near you. But the stranger in the sense of an inhabitant of the other space no longer exists. The desert is the disintegration of this structure, the placelessness. The sense of place is dissolved by today’s constant travelling. The desert is a metaphor for this placelessness, for the breaking up of social structures. It was already like this with the ancients, so that they saw the placelessness, death, on the other side of the Nile in the desert. For us it is the absolute forgetting of social responsibility and structures, the destruction of the space ... Again and again the attempts to remember. In this desert there are a few fragments of a bygone stable culture, which knew nothing of this frenzy and speed. These are only fragments which we attempt to decipher. The protagonists attempt to decipher something, to read something which is no longer comprehensible.”
As a kind of inner scenario of Wüstenbuch, we can see a journey in twelve stages. People on the search for the alien, for the origins of culture, encounter the ghostly figures of the past. The composition takes place as a development to the very extremes of oblivion: it culminates in exposure in the desert and the loss of all memory and in the disintegration of the feeling of identity. The subject is obliterated, a part of an abstract cosmos in which physical particles perform a dance of attraction and rejection. In the farewell, the distant utopia appears from a mere living together, humanity.
Double characters and phantoms belong to the cast of Wüstenbuch, thematicised musically in the area between the singing voice and spoken voice. The musical process is a development of the spoken, and the instrumented sung, that is to say of the absence of the voice, via the combination of many and diverse vocal forms up to pure solo singing. If the image of the journey into the desert implies a formal process of flux and motion, so the scenes appear like windows which open onto an action. Time, the succession of events, is, as it were, spatialised. In this respect, the view into a house or hotel, which opens the premiere production by Christoph Marthaler, is a congenial image.
“Xenos III”: An essay on the alien
At the centre of Beat Furrer’s compositional interests stands “the way from speaking to singing, the space between language and voice”. In Xenos III for strings and percussion, which is being premiered by Ensemble Resonanz in Vienna, Furrer composes the “instrumentation” of a text by Händl Klaus, a result of speech analysis. The tonal shape of the text, which rhythmicized in itself creates a particular kind of melody, flows into the composition. The string writing is spread across individual parts, the solo percussion, the timpani, becomes the “speaker” and its resonances, as it were, to a characteristic aura for the sentence which interweaves with itself. This is a further essay on the “alien”, the translation of the Greek word “Xenos”.
Marie Luise Maintz
(from [t]akte 1/2010)
Beat Furrer
Wüstenbuch. Musiktheater nach Texten von Händl Klaus, Ingeborg Bachmann, Antonio Machado und Lukrez sowie Papyrus Berlin 3024 (2009)
Besetzung: 2 Soprane, 2 Schauspielerinnen, Vokalensemble (mit solistischen Aufgaben): 2 Mezzosoprane, 4 Baritone (2 hoch, 2 tief)
Orchester: 2 (auch Picc, auch BFl), 1, 2 (auch Bklar, auch KbKlar), BarSax (auch SSax), 1 (auch Kfag) – 1,1,1,0 - Schlg (2) – Klav, Akk – Str