Erniedrigt – Geknechtet – Verlassen – Verachtet ...
(1975/1978–83)
for solo voices, chorus, orchestra and tape
Texts by Ernesto Cardenal, Florian Knobloch, Carolina María de Jesús, George Jackson

[01] Vorspruch 03:42
[02] I Um der Unterdrückten willen 10:20


[03] II Armut, Hunger, Hunger... 12:49
[04] III Gefangen, gefoltert... 08:30
[05] IV Steht alle auf, auch die Toten! 11:13
[06] V Senfkorn 07:26
[07] VI Tagesanbruch 06:08
[08] VII Das Volk stirbt nie  07:37

total time: 67:58

Anne Haenen, mezzo-soprano
Theophil Maier, tenor and speaker
Paul Yoder, bass baritone
Treble solo from the Tölzer Knabenchor

Schola Cantorum Stuttgart
Clytus Gottwald, rehearsals
SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart
Helmut Franz, rehearsals

SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg

Matthias Bamert, conductor
Kenneth Jean/ Burkhard Rempe/ Arturo Tamayo, co-conductors

Sound directors: Klaus Huber/ Peter Linke/ Dieter Mack/ Bernhard Mangold-Märkel

Tape parts: Electronic Studio of the Sweelinck Conservatory, Amsterdam (1981, Parts I & IV · Floris van Manen)
EXPERIMENTALSTUDIO des SWR (1983, Parts I–II & V–VII · Hans-Peter Haller, Rudolf Strauss, Arthur Kempter)

A liberated utopia and the promise of salvation

Klaus Huber’s extensive output is riddled with many a knot, each of which would seem to mark the end of a prolonged period of creative activity and the start of a new one. Such caesurae are typically inhabited by a large vocal and instrumental work. The landmarks include – at the beginning of the 1960s – the Augustinus oratorio Soliloquia, and in 2001, Schwarzerde (Black Earth) a work for the stage. At the exact midpoint, around 1980, lies the political oratorio Erniedrigt – Geknechtet – Verlassen – Verachtet… (Abased – Fettered – Abandoned – Despised).

In this work Huber brings his attention to a new kind of politically relevant music, his art reaching for the moment both a highpoint and a close. His textual models are authentic sketches from the world of work, the slum, and prison, these sources enhanced by passages from the writings of the Nicaraguan priest and politician Ernesto Cardenal, at the time one of the leading figures in Latin America’s ‘Liberation Theology’ movement. Cardenal’s texts form the central point of the piece in terms of intellectual thought.

Religious and political ideas are bound up one with another in this oratorio and form an artistic vision of what we recognise as mankind, struggling as it does to break free from its bonds and be responsible for its own fate; empathy for the oppressed, a call to political activism, and a promise of transcending the present, form a heady mix, one which may be seen as a kind of Christian-socialist utopia exactly as Cardenal and his cohort of believers would have wanted. In Huber’s work this message is not just formulated as a verbal call to arms, but saturates the music, reaching its innermost fibres. Meaning and content, along with the sound of language itself, are transformed into characteristic structures that allow the music to speak. What emerges is a chamber resonating to a revolutionary and eschatological message.

The composition process stretches over several years. The oldest section of this seven-part work is the chamber music piece Senfkorn (Mustard Seed), which was premiered in 1975, Huber taking it over lock, stock and barrel in the oratorio. The rest of the piece was completed between 1978 and 1982, with some additions being made in 1983. In a preliminary version, the work first saw the light of day on 11th June 1981 in Amsterdam under Ernest Bour; the third part, Gefangen, gefoltert… (Imprisoned, tortured), existed at the time only in a Particell, which was rendered by the narrator and singer Theophil Maier as a kind of phonemic composition accompanied by percussion. In its final form, the work was premiered on 14th October 1983 in Donaueschingen under Matthias Bamert.

The seven parts, as different as they are in terms of instrumentation and construction, dovetail into each other in a wonderful way, forming a substantial architectural form with many a cleft. In terms of its thought processes, the piece moves from the representation of the absolute negation of freedom to the struggle against repression and the mystical and transfigured apotheosis of freedom itself.

The beginning, Um der Unterdrückten willen (On the will of the oppressed), is a moment of great complexity and simultaneously one of greatest estrangement. The text used here is a realistic description of the production process from the viewpoint of the foundry worker Florian Knobloch. In compositional terms, the actual words are fed, as it were, into a chaffcutter; the serially composed instrumental part is divided into seven groups, which progress in different tempi and must be coordinated by three conductors. In this complex organisation, the work process becomes a monstrous machine that grinds up the individual. At the close, some lines from Psalm 21 comment in chorale form on the inferno.

Part II, Armut, Hunger, Hunger… (Poverty, hunger, hunger), brings a description of life in another milieu: a Brazilian slum, also told from the perspective of the afflicted. The lines taken from the diary of Carolina María de Jesús are combined with passages from a political poem, Oráculo sobre Managua (Oracle on Managua), by Ernesto Cardenal. The drab day to day existence is engendered by a ‘musica povera’ that calls up associations of emptiness, poverty, deadlock and detritus among other things.

The text to Part III, Gefangen, gefoltert… (Imprisoned, tortured), is taken from Prison Letters by the black American George Jackson. His was a vehement protest directed at prison conditions, his writings incorporating influences from Afro-American culture: fragments of work songs and prison songs from the southern states are joined together to form a mosaic.
After these three protocols of repression passively born, there follows in Part IV, Steht alle auf, auch die Toten! (Rise up all, the dead too!), the call to action. The struggle between two potential forms of violence – between the anarchic anger of the people and the military machinery of repression – reach their peak in a series of waves, until the repressive structures finally emerge as a musical vision of freedom.

Part V, Senfkorn, represents the introverted calm after the storm, one in which the weaker forces of hope are given free articulation. Motivic material from the bass aria “Es ist vollbracht” in Bach’s Cantata no. 159 is gradually pieced together into the tonal original; against this, a treble solo recites the vision of peace from Isaiah 11 and a verse from a psalm by Cardenal: “The new leaders will be pacifists and will create peace…”.

Part VI, based on Cardenal’s poem Amanecer (Daybreak), evokes – according to Huber – the “realm of peace that glows in the far distance”. Vertical agglomerations emerge only gradually in this soundscape; vocal and instrumental sounds melt into each other, and signal sounds of human activity and birdsong inhabit the surface.

Part VII, to words by Ernesto Cardenal “The people never dies / smiling, they leave the morgue”, presents a profane version of the resurrection. Four lines of music are presented as a chorale, derived from Bach’s Christ lag in Todesbanden. The music is gradually condensed by the use of overlaid sounds and tape playback; and as the sounds becomes ever more diffuse, a space opens up that appears infinite. The music moves off before sinking countless leagues away.

Max Nyffeler
Translation: Graham Lack

04/2010

03/2010

01-02/2010

I’ve come to realize that there is a specific musical genre that emerged in the second half of the 20th century in Europe, the politico-metaphysical oratorio. These are sprawling modernist works, usually based on secular subjects, but laced with meditations on the spiritual or philosophic (even if in the end they are discredited or abandoned). These pieces tend to involve theatrical elements, and the vocal delivery spans a range from atonal bel canto to Sprechstimme to full-throated screaming/barking. I’ve encountered and reviewed several of these by Nono, Lachenmann, and B. A. Zimmerman over the past few years. It’s a form that I have some trouble with, which I’ll detail below. The arrival of the massive work by Klaus Huber (b. 1924), Erniedrigt—Geknechtet—Verlassen—Verachtet (“Abased—Fettered—Abandoned—Despised”), composed in 1975–83, alerted my radar that this might not be a particularly pleasant experience (the title alone promises a rigorous evening’s entertainment).

I have heard very little of Huber’s music, but his reputation in Europe is extremely high, and above all, he’s renowned as the teacher of several generations of major composers, mostly at his post in Freiburg, Germany (from which he’s now retired). The work under review is in seven sections with an introduction, and is a compendium of texts primarily from the “liberation theologist” Ernesto Cardenal, but there are many others woven in, including that of Black Panther George Jackson. The overall tone of the work is that of outrage at political oppression and injustice, motivated by a Protestant religious fervor.

I can say at the beginning what deflates me about the music, but stay with me; a more rounded picture is going to emerge by the end. There is a lot of angst throughout, and the tone is entirely humorless. (The one inadvertently funny thing is the echt-German delivery of the letters of George Jackson, albeit in English.) One can’t help but feel that high German Expressionism, when mated with a Calvinistic view of man, indeed a rather omniscient judgment of human inhumanity, leads to a wrenching, indeed abrasive product. It can also seem condescending, preaching on high to the rest of us fools. This music is never fun, but then Huber is absolutely determined it should not be, as the subject is so serious and depressing. So in a sense it is exactly what it intends to be, and it’s up to us as listeners to decide how to react to it.

Having said that, I need to pull back and add a little perspective. I came to this piece with an admittedly skeptical perspective, and certainly much of it did not disappoint my expectations. But Huber actually has a number of things going for him, and, in fact, this piece strikes me as one of the best I’ve heard in the aforementioned genre. The opening, with the distant voices of choristers sounding like muffled torture victims screaming from their cells (the work uses pre-recorded parts effectively) is chilling. And over its course, the music frankly gets better, asserts more personality, and transcends at least somewhat the clichés of its medium. The fourth section, with its outbursts of quasi-chaotic Ivesian band music, alternating with what sounds like thousands of marching boots, gathers real force. The fifth section, a deconstruction and then reassembly of a Bach aria, has a haunting fragility. And the conclusion, with its huge waves of voices and instruments, which transform into a taped version that slowly echoes into silence over several minutes, makes a deep impression.

The upshot is that Huber actually makes something of worth here, and his subject is well served. (I’ll also say that while as an American I’m not fond of being lectured by Europeans on our failings as a culture, I share many of his opinions and concerns.) Nor is the piece nihilistic or totally despairing, as much of it suggests the enormous force of the people’s will, and by such representation creates some hope of it being activated for positive results.

So this is a recommendation, almost despite myself. The recording is clear and the performance strong. While all the texts are printed, they are multilingual, and without translation, so non-readers of German, Spanish, and Portuguese will be out of luck.

Robert Carl

Tages-Anzeiger
23.11.2009

09.09.2009

 
Dem Frieden eine Stimme verleihen

Klaus Huber gehört zu den Komponisten, dem erst spät die Achtung zuteil geworden ist, die ihm gebührt. In diesem Jahr wurde ihm der Ernst von Siemens Musikpreis verliehen, und nicht wenige fragen sich, warum seine Meisterschaft erst so spät erkannt wurde, gehört doch Klaus Huber zu den wachen Komponisten, die äußerst sensibel auf ihre Zeit reagieren, ohne sich den Gesetzen des Marktes anzupassen. Vielleicht liegt es daran, dass ein griffiger Personalstil bei Huber schwer zu lokalisieren ist. Das Etikettendenken unserer Zeit verlangt nach griffigen Schlagwörtern, mit denen Schubladen zu füllen sind, und eine eindeutige Einordnung lässt Hubers Musik nicht zu. Seine Sprache richtet sich nicht nur nach dem Sujet, die sie behandelt, sie bleibt auch kompromisslos experimentierfreudig, so dass er auch in hohem Alter, wo andere ihre Errungenschaften in einem Spätwerk hegen und pflegen, stets neues Material findet und sich verfügbar macht. Erst kürzlich hat er dies in seinem monumentalen Bekenntniswerk ‘Quod est Pax – Vers la raison du coeur’ in Donaueschingen erneut bewiesen.

Überhaupt sind es oft jene bekenntnishaften Vokalwerken von großem Ausmaß, die Meilensteine oder Wendepunkte in den Schaffensphasen von Klaus Huber markieren. Dazu zählt ohne Zweifel das groß angelegte Oratorium ‘Erniedrigt – Geknechtet – Verlassen – Verachtet...’ für Stimmen, Chor, Orchester und Tonband, das 1983 vollendet und uraufgeführt wurde. Ein Mitschnitt dieser Aufführung in Donaueschingen ist jetzt in einer schönen Edition bei NEOS erschienen.

Das Werk ist gewissermaßen ein Pendant zu Luigi Nonos ‘Prometeo’. Entstanden in einer Zeit, in der sich das Scheitern der Vision einer anderen Gesellschaft abzeichnete, weisen beide Komponisten mit ihrer Musik in eine offene Zukunft und zu einer befreiten Menschheit hin, ohne dogmatische Parolen, sondern mit einer messianischen Offenheit hinein ins Unbekannte der Nacht. In ‘Erniedrigt – Geknechtet – Verlassen – Verachtet...’ ist es der fünfte Teil, ‘Senfkorn’ betitelt, in dem eine schwache Vision von einer Insel des Friedens aufleuchtet. Motive aus der Bass-Arie ‘Es ist vollbracht’ von Johann Sebastian Bach erinnern an das christliche Versprechen von menschlicher Wärme und Frieden für alle Menschen, eine Erinnerung, die gleichzeitig Vision für die Zukunft sein soll.

Hubers Oratorium beginnt mit der Darstellung des geknechteten Menschen. Texte, Originalberichte aus der Welt der Produktion, der Gefängnisse und Slums, bilden die Grundlage der Komposition, hinzu kommen Auszüge aus Schriften des Befreiungstheologen Ernesto Cardenal, die den geistigen Mittelpunkt des Werkes bilden. Die Musik entsteht aus dem semantischen Material: So ist der erste Satz ein Tableau von höchster Komplexität, der Text wird zerhackt, die Musik besteht aus verschiedenen seriellen Schichten in unterschiedlichen Tempi, die von drei Dirigenten koordiniert werden, so dass eine gigantische Maschinerie entsteht, in der kein Platz ist für das individuelle Schicksal des Menschen.

Demgegenüber steht im zweiten Teil, der die Armut brasilianischer Slums beschreibt, eine entkleidete Musik, in der kein Platz mehr für klanglichen Reichtum ist. Die Haftbedingungen, die der dritte Teil des Oratoriums mit den ‘Prison Letters’ des Afroamerikaners George Jackson anklagt, werden durch Klänge, die allesamt aus der amerikanischen Hymne abgeleitet sind, drastisch verdeutlicht: Huber konstruiert aus dem harmonischen Material der Hymne Vierteltonakkorde, die wie Gefängnisstäbe die Musik einpferchen.

Hubers Musik begnügt sich nicht mit der Anklage der grausamen Zustände sondern evoziert eine Vision von Frieden und Freiheit: nach dem Wendepunkt im ‘Senfkorn’ breitet sich die ‘Ferne des Friedensreiches’ aus, mit Material des Bach-Chorals ‘Christ lag in Todesbanden’ und klingenden Zeugnissen von Mensch und Natur, die sich vom Tonband mit der Musik vermischen.

Zwei Chöre, die Schola Cantorum Stutttgart und das SWR Vokalensemble, das Sinfonieorchester des SWR, vier Solisten und ein elektronisches Tonband verleihen dem formal und klanglich hochkomplexen Werk zahlreiche individuelle Stimmen. Vier Dirigenten und Klangregisseurs kümmern sich um die Koordination von Musikern und Tonband. Dass das Experiment gelungen ist, zeigt diese Aufnahme, mittlerweile schon ein historisches Dokument. Trotz aller Historizität ist Hubers Werk heute aktueller denn je: die Vision, der er durch die Musik Ausdruck verleiht, ist noch weit davon entfernt, reale Gegenwart zu werden.

Paul Hübner

 

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03.07.2009

05/2009