Jean-Pierre Collot - Spectral Visions of Goethe

WINTER&WINTER conceives a canon of the most extraordinary piano works of world literature performed by the unique French artist Jean-Pierre Collot.

After Hans Abrahamsen's "Schnee“ (with ensemble recherché), the album "Universe" (Claude Debussy in dialogue with Salvatore Sciarrino), "Espaces Imaginaires" (with premiere recordings of Jean Barraqué's masterpieces) now the Goethe texts Restless Love, An Schwager Kronos, Meeresstille, Erlkönig and Gretchen am Spinnrade inspire the composers Hugues Dufourt and Schubert/Liszt to dedicate themselves to Sturm und Drang, a German movement of the late 18th century that exalted nature, feeling, and human individualism and sought to overthrow the Enlightenment cult of Rationalism. Goethe and Schiller began their careers as prominent members of the movement.

Hugues Dufourt answers questions by Kornelia Bittmann:
Why did I choose An Schwager Kronos to begin with? On the one hand because the world of Sturm und Drang interested me, and Goethe of course. There was the reference to Schubert, and I always found Schubert's choices brilliant, especially in relation to Goethe's poetry. Nor should we forget the terrible, omnipresent, mediating shadow of Beethoven. Let us remember that Beethoven wrote - or tried to write - the four Lieder that Schubert set to music and that Liszt rewrote. So I am standing at the end of a very long pianistic tradition which is also a deeply reflective one, Schubert meditating on Goethe and Beethoven, Liszt obviously meditating on the three previous ones: it is the whole symbolic, poetic, but also critical and political history of the Lied that I wanted to approach step by step.

Everything starts with Goethe anyway. It was Goethe who shaped what was perhaps the loftiest period in the history of European culture. Goethe tilts our cultural perspective, in that his poetry ends up attaching more importance to geological time than to historical time: he introduces something unique, which is this instantaneous perception, in the most fleeting moment, of the millennia underlying the landscape he is contemplating. This awareness has changed I think the nature of music – German and Austrian music in particular - and it can be said that this perception that shaped Schubert's music continues to The Song of the Earth, to Mahler's Lieder, which in this case are Lieder from a bitter eternity.

I made a conversion, even an act of contrition towards Schubert, a composer I neglected in my youth, being much too Beethovenian by nature and, as a good Frenchman, attached to the revolutionary world and therefore to the Beethovenian dynamic. Schubert is the ingenious symbol of Metternich's world, and therefore of a kind of repressive and stupid authority that is raining down all over Europe, sending poets, journalists and even musicians to prison — Schubert was put on a police file and ended up one night with a black eye. The period that followed Beethoven's was of less interest to me, and it was only little by little that I understood Schubert's evolution, and to understand it I had to understand better also how Schubert had to fight not only implicitly against the political world, but against the first industrialization of musical pleasure, because at the time it was Johann Strauss I's world that prevailed. The first problematisation and critique of the music industry was therefore born at this time, around 1820. And the second major criticism of the music industry was made by Adorno, but he didn't always say he wasn't the first. He's the second in history.

An Schwager Kronos
We have to go back to the period when Goethe wrote this hymn An Schwager Kronos, in 1774, written in a single flow, in a post-carriage, returning from a trip to Karlsruhe. Goethe melts two emblematic entities, the Traveller and the Titan, into a single character. Kronos, the sinister coachman, leads the souls to Pluto. This carriage driver, who is the emblematic figure of time and destiny, leads with unbearable slowness - unbearable especially to the poet, who is impatient because he is intoxicated with his own glory. Thus, An Schwager Kronos, like any Goethe, is extremely ambivalent, because he implicitly associates and at the same time opposes tenses: there is always the most immediate, the most enthusiastic, the most dynamic time, and simultaneously the most factitious, the most superficial time, the time of seductive illusion that leads to a fatal destiny. [I deliberately didn't deal with the poet's fever.] It should be pointed out that Goethe here does not differentiate between Kronos with a K, which is the father of the gods, and Chronos with CH, which is the god of time. Still, these mixed gods form an extremely dark and slow god, in total contrast to the hubris, to the poet's impatient spontaneity. There's always self-criticism in Goethe's work. As for me, I have chosen the slow tempo, I have tried to translate the deepest meaning of the poem, rather than making a literal commentary on it. The four translations I have been able to create of Goethe's poems do not necessarily follow Schubert's vision of them, if at all. Sometimes, as in Meeresstille - yes, because Schubert's vision is prodigious and unrivalled, because it is pure emergence, and you can't match such music. For An Schwager Kronos, it's a bit different, because Schubert has rather effectively followed the sense of the words, allowed himself to be led by a literal empathy.

Rastlose Liebe
I believe that it was one of Goethe's characteristics to have seized in the world, like Wagner, only the hell, the underworld. Heaven, paradise, it was Liszt who took care of that, not Wagner nor Goethe. Schubert would have wanted to — but no. This is what fascinated me in this historical-cultural ambivalence, this ambivalence of great minds. You can't admit it, but it has to be said: fulfilled love is mortally boring, there is nothing interesting in love but illusions, longings. I have been described, until recently, as a musician from hell, even as a pessimist. And why not? If one looks at my musical productions, they are more devoted to lost illusions and real hells than to utopian aspirations, which I don't believe in anyway. I believe in politics, but certainly not in utopia. What also brings me back to Goethe is the auscultation that he undertook of humanity through primitive times, and even the geological times that preceded it, and here we have, without a doubt, a thread that is specific to Germany, because there is, starting with Goethe, a whole history of the unconscious that is truly original and leads us to Freud. And with this one a total mental revolution is taking place. So I question humanity through its works of art, that's for sure, because the work of art gives us a unique insight into the history of the psyche of mankind, and moreover, discovers aspects that cannot be translated by language, I think of the colours of Greek painting, the incredible colours of late Roman painting that archaeologists and Tiepolo were able to understand and recognize, rediscover. Art is a way of scrutinizing humanity.

Meeresstille
This moment of calm before the storm makes me think of the chaos of the Greeks. Now the chaos of the Greeks was precisely this sea whose top, bottom, left and right could no longer be fixed. It was a world where one was absolutely lost, a world without dimensions. But the very image of chaos was the world of the sea. And this calm sea that preceded the gust of wind was given in an unprecedented way by Schubert. It should be remembered that Meeresstille, transformed into a Lied by Schubert, was also set to music by Beethoven, who made a choral piece of it in 1816, and Hugo Wolf was also inspired by it. Each title represents a whole bundle of meanings, so I didn't limit myself to the Goethe-Schubert confrontation. I know very well that these are matrix themes that touch absolutely all of German culture. So what does Meeresstille mean? It means first of all flat calm, but also overwhelming shimmering. It is the quiet before the storm, but also that climate of oppressive torpor, of false serenity, of false appeasement that precedes the darkness. So here we are again almost immersed in An Schwager Kronos: there are all the illusions given by appearances, and then there is the end, and this end would be for Freud the very expression of the death drive, if by death drive we mean the irresistible temptation to return to the inert, which lies in wait for every human being, beyond the pleasure principle.

One can recognize in my own music as well as in the music I refer to certain fundamental structures that could be said to be obsessive. But just as there are a thousand ways of creating a sound, with the arm or even the back or the way you put your hands down, in the same way there are a thousand ways to write a sonority; and if you modify, change the nature of the gesture, you change the nature of the sound and the meaning. So it's not about variations or repetitions, but permanent variations within a gesture, a gesture that gradually becomes archetypal. What I have been looking for in the history of music are these fundamental patterns, these archetypes, which are rare: music, like practically all mental disciplines, is based on a small number of fundamental images or matrices. This is what brings me to this work of repetition, of analogy: novelty is no longer at all in the inventive variation, it is on the contrary in the always differentiated questioning of the same.

Erlkönig
The fundamental structure comes from what I have named »spectral composition«, where all categories of ‘piano’ and ‘music’ intermingle each time in a specific variant. So it can be a vaguely melodic element that emerges, it can be a rhythmic element that prevails, it can be a timbre, these are extremely diverse things, where at the end of the day every »dissonance« [as they used to say], every structure finds its resolution on another level. In other words, a rhythmic or harmonic structure finds its resolution in other modes of writing, each time it is necessary to switch from one register to the other: one can move imperceptibly from one well-defined category of music — pitch, timbre, harmony, noise, etc. — to another. You can compose transitions, or even place yourself on borders without knowing exactly where you are.

This is something I haven't had a chance to say until now: it's obvious that in the post-Freudian world we live in, the part played by the unconscious in music is more and more considerable. We have experienced the world of the prevailing structure in the post-war period, but what we call the world of sound can just as easily be called the world of the unconscious. So it's a plunge into one's own unconscious, and as a result: let yourself dream your dreams and you'll see what will come out of it. Abandon precise attention, even a critical look. I think that the best attitude is the floating attention that Freud advocates in psychoanalysis sessions, where you let things unfold and they end up making sense at the very end, and you say to yourself: »Ah well! So that was it!«