Champs de Bataille: upload Burzum's Hvis Lyset Tar Oss to your mobile phone. Attend a public performance of John Cage's 4'33'', wait for about a minute after Cage's composition starts and play Burzum's music. Can Cage's collective, improvisational and deskilled silence envelop and swallow Burzum, or does the Burzumic drama overpower and subjugate Cage?
Many readers will associate the clown Pierrot with the kitsch porcelain statuettes and the sentimental pictures found in the homes of the elderly. But the melancholic and naive clown has a nightside: he is moonstruck, and the moonstruck are lunatic, and the lunatic are dangerous.
What if Pierrot's white-face maquillage was an antecedent of corpse-paint?
II
In Thomas Mann's novel "Doktor Faustus", the protagonist Adrian Leverkühn is an expressionist composer who sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for 25 years of musical genius. Leverkühn, whose music becomes more and more apocalyptic as his sanity is slowly worn away by Satan, is a thinly disguised Arnold Schönberg, as Mann points out in a short afterword to the novel.
Wikipedia points out: "Pierrot Lunaire is a work that contains many paradoxes: the instrumentalists, for example, are soloists and an orchestra at the same time; Pierrot is both the hero and the fool, acting in a drama that is also a concert piece, performing cabaret as high art and vice versa with song that is also speech; and his is a male role sung by a woman, who shifts between the first and third persons". Thus, the composition places ambiguity central stage. As anthropologist Mary Douglas pointed out, ambiguity can be very disturbing, as it threatens the way humans order and give meaning to the perceived world. Ambiguity equals uncleanness, ritual pollution, defilement, supernatural danger.
The album documents an almost luridly beautiful performance. However cultured and civilized classical composition may be, there is something hallucinatory, something deranged, something apocalyptic, about this music. The composition is very expressionistic, the music moving along angles as odd as those of any building in Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari. Schäfer's singing is appropriately mime-like, highly stylized, almost as if she expresses her vocal art through body motions, without use of speech; and the lyrical themes of blasphemy, eroticism, violence and murder endow her voice with a baneful aura.
III
Here a five YouTube videos of Tempus Fugit performing Schönberg's 'Pierrot Lunaire'.
IV
Through Schönberg's composition, I discovered the almost-forgotten Belgian poet Albert Giraud. Giraud (a pen-name of Émile Albert Kayenberg) wrote the poem-cycle "Pierrot Lunaire", which furnished the title of and the words to the piece of music. Giraud (1960-1929) was a symbolist, a proponent of "art-for-art's-sake" and an admirer of Baudelaire (what a sad fate to admire the sharpest contemporary detractor of one's native country and people! To admire Baudelaire as a Belgian now is one thing, but to admire him then...). Poor Giraud, because of Schönberg's composition Otto Erich Hartleben's translation of his work became better-known than the French original.
The entire poem-cycle is reproduced in French and in a poor English translation here. Below are reproduced two poems in French. I provided both with a literal English translation (translations for which I claim no artistic quality as I am neither a poet nor a trained translator).
Messe rouge
Pour la cruelle Eucharistie, Sous l'éclair des ors aveuglants Et des cierges aux feux troublants, Pierrot sort de la sacristie.
Sa main, de la Grâce investie, Déchire ses ornements blancs, Pour la cruelle Eucharistie, Sous l'éclair des ors aveuglants,
Et d'un grand geste d'amnistie Il montre aux fidèles tremblants Son coeur entre ses doigts sanglants, -- Comme une horrible et rouge hostie Pour la cruelle Eucharistie.
Red Mass
For a cruel Communion Under rays of blinding gold And of church candle's flickering light Pierrot leaves the sacristy.
His hands, with Grace invested, Tear at the priestly robes For a cruel Communion Under rays of blinding gold And with a gesture of benediction He shows the trembling believers His heart in his blood-stained hands Like a terrible and crimson wafer For a cruel Communion
Papillons noirs
De sinistres papillons noirs Du soleil ont éteint la gloire, Et l'horizon semble un grimoire Barbouillé d'encre tous les soirs.
Il sort d'occultes encensoirs Un parfum troublant la mémoire; De sinistres papillons noirs Du soleil ont éteint la gloire.
Des monstres aux gluants suçoirs Recherchent du sang pour le boire, Et du ciel, en poussière noire, Descendent sur nos désespoirs. De sinistres papillons noirs.
Black Butterflies
Sinister black butterflies Extinguished the sun's glory And the sky looks like a wizard's book Ink-stained every evening.
From occult censers waft Perfumes troubling memory: Sinister black butterflies Extinguished the sun's glory.
Monsters with sticky suckers Searching for blood to drink, And from the skies, like black powder, Descend upon our desperation Sinister black butterflies
Post scriptum
Here is an interesting analysis of Schönberg's "Pierrot Lunaire" (link).
Here is a Dutch short documentary about Edgard Varèse's electronic music piece 'Poème Électronique'. The Dutch-language titles, translated into English, read:
"The Electronic Poem
Philips has developed automated equipment, which heralds a new art with unlimited possibilities, which is the electronic interplay of light, color, image, word and music in space.
The 'electronic poem', put together by the architect Le Corbusier, his co-worker Yean Xenakis and the musician Edgard Varèse, shows how our increasingly mechanized society strives for a future new harmony.
The show consists of the following parts: creation mind and matter from darkness to dawn gods created by human hands how time forges civilization harmony to all mankind".
'Black in color, with a gaping mouth and projecting teeth and disheveled hair, clad in filthy garments, very smelly, and dwelling in empty, broken-down buildings'
Champs de Bataille: upload Burzum's Hvis Lyset Tar Oss to your mobile phone. Attend a public performance of John Cage's 4'33'', wait for about a minute after Cage's composition starts and play Burzum's music. Can Cage's collective, improvisational and deskilled silence envelop and swallow Burzum, or does the Burzumic drama overpower and subjugate Cage?
