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Beat Furrer

Beat Furrer Comment: Adorno is still an important companion. Especially in those passages where his great love of Mahler and the Viennese School becomes apparent – where he writes about Webern’s lyrical moments as “breathing in” and “holding the breath”, or about Berg as “master of the smallest link”. Or when, in his descriptive analysis of Mahler’s 4th Symphony, he demonstrates how deeply attached he felt to the Second Viennese School, or rather: how he managed the rare feat of finding the right words to characterise the nature of the Second Viennese School. These books count among the greatest texts on great art today.

Beat Furrer Comment: Adorno is still an important companion. Especially in those passages where his great love of Mahler and the Viennese School becomes apparent – where he writes about Webern’s lyrical moments as “breathing in” and “holding the breath”, or about Berg as “master of the smallest link”. Or when, in his descriptive analysis of Mahler’s 4th Symphony, he demonstrates how deeply attached he felt to the Second Viennese School, or rather: how he managed the rare feat of finding the right words to characterise the nature of the Second Viennese School. These books count among the greatest texts on great art today.

Beat Furrer Comment: I expect any composer would regard Beckett as a mystery. The form of his narrative, the repetitions, transformations, the way in which the story is developed – clearly, these are also compositional issues.

Beat Furrer Comment: I expect any composer would regard Beckett as a mystery. The form of his narrative, the repetitions, transformations, the way in which the story is developed – clearly, these are also compositional issues.

Beat Furrer Comment: “A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

(Benjamin, Walter: Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1940, in: Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, New York: Schocken Books, 1969, p. 257.)

Beat Furrer Comment: “A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

(Benjamin, Walter: Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1940, in: Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, New York: Schocken Books, 1969, p. 257.)

Beat Furrer Comment: The Leipzig lectures, in particular the ones on the Renaissance, have governed my great fascination with the vocal music of this era. With philosophical emphasis, Bloch speaks about Giordano Bruno – the “minstrel of infinity”, as he calls him. I felt as if Bloch’s lecture were able to take me back to that time and its infinite wealth of vocal music.

Beat Furrer Comment: In a letter to his bride Wilhelmine Jaeglé, Büchner refers to the automaton from Leonce and Lena by way of example, describing how his own voice seems strange and mechanic to him, like the pipes of a barrel organ – an expression of the alienation felt in an increasingly industrialised society.

“… I gave myself quite a turn… the eyes glazed, the cheeks as if made of wax, and once the whole machine started wobbling, joints twitching, voice creaking, and I heard the eternal organ song warble, and saw the pegs and cogs inside the barrel organ jump and spin – … our groans on the rack, what if they existed merely to pierce through the cracks in the clouds and, sounding further and further, to die like a melodic breeze in heavenly ears?” (8.3.1834)

Beat Furrer Comment: Despite being an outsider, Dino Campana had a great impact on the Italian literature of his time – with Canti Orfici, his only work. After five years of volcanic productivity, he fell silent. The rise of fascism also contributed to his disappearance. My only Italian opera La bianca notte tells the story of his struggle for survival as artist, and of his failure.

Beat Furrer Comment: One cannot subsume the Notes from the House of the Dead under a single storyline; rather, they consist of many different strands which are arranged around essential moral themes – a brilliantly modern dramaturgical design, which has also had a crucial impact on my own thought in relation to music theatre – and hasn’t lost any of its fascinating allure. I still marvel at the fact that Leoš Janáček chose this novel as subject-matter for his last opera.

Beat Furrer Comment: The same topics as in Achille Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason: racism, colonialism, violence. Fanon’s analysis of the French war in Algeria gives us to understand how Africa was influenced by the crimes committed in the name of colonialism, and points out the consequences of this history – which are prevalent to this day. Mbembe frequently refers to Fanon.

Beat Furrer Comment: Eisejuaz – Paqui: a constellation reminiscent of Beckett. In a harsh, rhythmically concise language, Sara Gallardo creates images of a postcolonial society in the North Argentinian city of Salta. For Eisejuaz, employee at a local sawmill, trees and animals are persons with whom he is engaged in a continuous exchange. Paqui likes to be served and feels nothing but contempt for this “dirty Indian”, as he calls him.

Gallardo’s novel, which is based on an interview, shows with harrowing clarity how our relationship towards “the Other” – whether it’s nature, or human beings of a different culture – is characterised by the attitude of a conqueror towards the conquered. Das grosse Feuer, my most recent opera, addresses this form of colonial violence.

Beat Furrer Comment: The anthropologist Koch-Grünberg, who died in Brazil in 1924, studied South American indigenous peoples even before Lévi-Strauss. With great respect and profound sympathy, he described rituals, chants, instruments, languages, and the local parlance of the Venezuelan Pémon. He also wrote about art and its role in their social coexistence. Like Lévi-Strauss, his oeuvre seems to be overshadowed by a deeply felt melancholy in the face of the incipient process towards extinction of these highly cultivated civilisations, and the wasted opportunities of our society to meet them in an exchange at eye-level.

Beat Furrer Comment: The oeuvre of the French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour was also key to my work on Das grosse Feuer. Latour’s thought coincides with that of Eisejuaz, the native of North Argentina, insofar as it contradicts our notion that we, as human beings, are living amidst calculable objects, i.e. nature. Both are aware of our dependence on the life that surrounds us – microorganisms, plants, animals; both testifying to the gulf between two fundamentally different world views.

Beat Furrer Comment: The oeuvre of the French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour was also key to my work on Das grosse Feuer. Latour’s thought coincides with that of Eisejuaz, the native of North Argentina, insofar as it contradicts our notion that we, as human beings, are living amidst calculable objects, i.e. nature. Both are aware of our dependence on the life that surrounds us – microorganisms, plants, animals; both testifying to the gulf between two fundamentally different world views.

Beat Furrer Comment: In the 1930s, Claude Lévi-Strauss spent considerable time in the tropical forests of Brazil, and later returned to the country – after an absence of two decades. He writes that in those early days, he had borne witness to what it could have meant to be a human being – with all the implications of a free, self-determined life. But now, 20 years later, everything lay in ruins – the forests destroyed, its dwellers displaced, or they had died of diseases imported by whites. This harrowing report by the French explorer, as well as the question why human civilisation is incapable of responding appropriately to the threatening climate change, marked the beginning of my preoccupation with colonial exploitation.

Beat Furrer Comment: Written in hexameters, this is a great literary work of art – both descriptive, and time and again of great expressivity. Influenced by Epicurus’s anti-mythical philosophy, Lucretius describes optic and acoustic phenomena; he describes volcanic eruptions and devotes himself to the exploration of planetary movements, of gravity, and much else – everything couched in marvellously powerful language. I have used various fragments of his writings in my work; for instance in Violetter Schnee, or in Spazio immergente I-III, as well as in FAMA.

Beat Furrer Comment: Journey through the Night is a text which Friederike Mayröcker sent me in the 1990s. This distinctive language, its lightness, clarity and width of range, fascinated me. It is itself like music. It took a few years before I dared to write a short duet for flute and voice, in an attempt to find the right approach to this language-as-music. The result was auf tönernen füssen.