Zwischen Leben und Tod [Between Life and Death]: twenty-two pieces after images by Peter Weiss // by Michael Hersch

Die Maschinen griefen die Menschheit an

I first learned of Peter Weiss’s (1916-1982) artwork almost a decade ago while reading W.G. Sebald’s (1944-2001) On the Natural History of Destruction. Sebald’s writing -- as it has on many others -- made a deep impression on me, so much so that fragments from his poem After Nature form a framework for my horn and cello work, Last Autumn (2008). Isolated lines, or groups of lines, from the poem came to mind as I was writing the piece. Particular verbal images captured in shape or texture much of what I felt. When Last Autumn is performed, however, Sebald’s texts are not sung or recited; it is purely instrumental music. I placed the texts at designated junctures in the written score before various movements of music. The texts did, and still do, represent a kind of private communication between me and Sebald’s words. This kind of dialog between composers and poets is nothing new, of course. There are many examples across the centuries of composers writing music with outside texts in quiet co-existence. 

Some five years later, the artwork of Peter Weiss had a similar effect on me, but Weiss’s paintings and drawings had a more direct impact on the music. Weiss’s spectrum of color and motion, of proportion and spacing, struck me as particularly musical, and I found this both provocative and inspiring. While Sebald’s texts had acted as companions which reinforced and heightened my own state of mind, Weiss’s environments included both familiar and alien worlds that I wanted to capture directly in sound. In either case, I felt at home. For the first time, I felt compelled to engage directly with images through music. 

I had only known of Peter Weiss as a playwright before reading Sebald’s essay about him. While I was familiar with some of his searing stage dramas, I did not know that from the time he was a young man he was a serious visual artist as well. One of his earliest works, Selbsporträt zwischen Tod und Schwester (Self-portrait between Death and Sister), was completed in 1935 after the death of his sister in an accident. The drawing has many hallmarks of his later writing and artwork: pronounced disquiet, looming threat, wistfulness. I find compelling that Weiss, from one work to the next, takes an active or more participatory, or more passive and detached, stance toward his subjects - especially in the paintings expressing what appears to be terror or grief, or both of these states simultaneously. Throughout his work there are also recurring images that seem deeply meditative; for example, animate and even inanimate subjects lost in thought. 

Selbsporträt zwischen Tod und Schwester

In his essay on the artist, subtitled On Memory and Cruelty in the Work of Peter Weiss, Sebald discusses several of the paintings, including Das grosse Welttheater (The Great World Theater), which he describes as 

“... a pandemonium of transgression in front of a background of capsizing ships and lit by the reflection of a conflagration ... it denotes a now permanent state of destruction. What is seen, here and now, is already an underworld beyond anything natural, a surreal region of industrial complexes and machines, chimneys, silos, viaducts, walls, labyrinths, leafless trees, and cheap fairground attractions …” 

Das grosse Welttheater

In Weiss’ Gartenkonzert (Concert in the Garden) Sebald sees

“... figures with lowered eyelids ... including the young harpsichordist with his blind gaze, are among the harbingers of a life surviving at best only in the sensation of pain, in unreserved identification with the despised, scorned, crippled, and fading, with those who sit weeping in their concealment …” 

Das Gartenkonzert

Though each of these paintings is quite different, below the surface similar tensions roil. 

Zwischen Leben und Tod is a program-length work for violin and piano. The music is structured in twenty-two movements, each movement corresponding to a particular image by Weiss. This is my third work that has had a relationship with visual art; the others are Images From a Closed Ward (after etchings by Michael Mazur) and Black Untitled (after a painting of the same name by Willem de Kooning). Of the three pieces, Zwischen Leben und Tod is most closely intertwined with the artwork, while my approach in Images From a Closed Ward and Black Untitled was closer to that of Last Autumn. 

While I did not know him personally, W.G. Sebald gave me two great gifts: his writing itself which has been, and continues to be, a source of solace and inspiration, and an introduction to Peter Weiss’s artwork. I am neither an art historian nor literary critic. But I hope, as Sebald did, that more people may discover the artwork of this extraordinary figure. 

At the conclusion of his essay, Sebald quotes a passage from Weiss’s Ästhetik des Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance): 

“O Herakles. The light is dim, my pencil blunt. I would have wished to write it all differently. But the time is too short. And I have run out of paper.” 

Junge im Garten

Translations of W.G. Sebald into English from the original German by Anthea Bell  

Der Krieg

Michael Hersch (b. 1971) is a composer and pianist.

Michael Hersch's Zwischen Leben und Tod: twenty-two pieces after images by Peter Weiss receives its world premiere on February 26, 2015 at the Blair School of Music, Vanderbilt University, performed by violinist Carolyn Huebl and pianist Mark Wait.

Images from a Closed Ward: Michael Hersch on Michael Mazur

Michael Mazur, Closed Ward #3, used by permission of Michael Mazur estate

The composer George Rochberg wrote that “the face of a human being can be read as a record of his brief and painful experience of life and consciousness, the victories and defeats, the stages (and nonstages) of his inner evolution.” As an illustration, Rochberg recalled his encounter with portraits of Rembrandt and of Schoenberg, both relatively youthful, their faces emitting varying degrees of confidence, strength and good health. He then reflected upon portraits depicting these same faces which were created decades later, images recorded towards the end of both Rembrandt’s and Schoenberg’s lives. Describing Rembrandt’s face, Rochberg remarked, “The ego of the man is burnt out; what is left is a look of such sadness, such a sense of the impersonal wisdom of old age that it catches at the throat.” Of Schoenberg: “... a face so ravaged and destroyed by the passage of time and so scourged by the intensity of his inner life as to make one marvel that it is the same man. This is the image that haunts me ...”

I first came into contact with the artist Michael Mazur (1935-2009) in 2000 while I was living in Italy. I had arrived in the country not long before, the fortunate and somewhat startled recipient of a Rome Prize in composition. In the preceding years, I had applied for this award a number of times, and when I received word of my selection, I was both excited and uncertain. It had only been a few years since I had completed school, and I realized that I was just settling into a routine which suited me. The thought of beginning anew for an extended period in an unfamiliar place gave me pause. In the end, it was the the art and architecture of Rome--in particular, the small churches that seemed to beckon every hundred paces or so during my walks in the city-- that drew me most forcefully. I knew I would get good work done in those mysterious and extraordinary structures, and I wrote frequently in them, often alone. It is almost impossible to describe now the colors, the smells, the dense shadows, the infinite variations of quiet. My mind would play tricks on me. I would see faces in the darkened recesses which would seem to suddenly appear and then, just as suddenly, vanish.

Michael Mazur, Locked Ward, The Corridor, used by permission of Michael Mazur estate

In fact, since childhood I have been drawn to depictions of the human figure and the human face. Faces above all captured my attention and remain the root of my interest in the visual arts. I sometimes find myself trying to avoid hearing the voice of a given individual if I find meaning in the face, as if hearing the voice would remove the narrative the face had created for me.

Soon after my arrival in Rome I happened upon an exhibition of Mazur's The Inferno of Dante, a series of forty-one etchings with accompanying texts of Dante translated into English by Robert Pinsky. I entered the exhibition and immediately felt the commanding presence of powerful art: this is, for anyone, a rare feeling. I had experienced the musical equivalent of my reaction to Mazur’s art when I first encountered the work of certain instrumentalists and conductors: the recorded performances of Josef Hofmann, Charles Munch, David Oistrakh, the young Alexis Weissenberg, for example, and live performances of Pollini, Abbado, Jansons, Boulez, to name but a few more. In the rooms with the Mazur etchings I felt a deep familiarity: a feeling of shared sensibility, if not shared experience.

Michael Mazur, Closed Ward #6, used by permission of the Michael Mazur estate

There was a feeling in that space which I came to find in other works of Mazur to which I found myself particularly drawn, the early Locked Ward and Closed Ward series, his etchings and aquatints of trees, and his late works, including the terrifying Headless in Iraq series and Explosion of 2007/2008. The immediacy was there even if I saw a photograph of a given work at a fraction of the piece’s original scale. The faces depicted in Mazur’s Locked Ward and Closed Ward etchings, rendered from his experiences visiting a psychiatric hospital in Rhode Island in the early 1960s, tend to be obscured. They nevertheless betray the complexity and nuance of human circumstance: inner and outer suffering, absolute vulnerability, violence, compassion, humor, knowing.

Soon after attending the Dante exhibition, Michael Mazur and I met. During the remaining time Mazur spent at the Academy he would often stop by the space where I worked, and there I would play through many of my own compositions at the piano for him. Although we worked in very different mediums, I sensed that Mazur connected with what I was doing more than most. Throughout the many hours I played, I felt I knew what he was thinking and feeling in real time, even with my attention on the music at hand. When my first recording was released in 2003, Mazur wrote a program note for it. While ostensibly discussing my music, he provided insight into himself and his art: “I am struck by what might constitute an analogy with painting and with my own work in particular. There is, of course, the overwhelming sense of ʻsadness,ʼ which is better than ʻdoom.ʼ In fact, the ʻabyssʼ in its finality is easy to portray: a rich black says it all ... Dante looked into the abyss but primarily found sadness there. Sadness is a much more complicated and, therefore, interesting human condition.”

Michael Mazur, Locked Ward #11, used by permission of the Michael Mazur estate

Some years after we met, I came across a number of etchings from the Locked Ward and Closed Ward series. In mid-2009, for the first time in almost 20 years, I began work on a string quartet. The catalysts for this work were the recent deaths of my closest friend and of my principal teacher, and the inability to shake some of the Closed Ward images from my mind. The fact that visual art became something of an ignition point for my own work was a very new experience for me. As the summer of 2009 wound down, I had formulated the broad outlines of the work enough that I decided it would be a good time to reconnect with Mazur. I was extremely excited at the prospect of seeing him again, and I suspected that he would be surprised and pleased that something he had created had a hand in the shaping of this new work. Less than 24 hours before I planned to contact him, I read of his untimely death in a Sunday newspaper. I completed the new piece, Images From a Closed Ward, in 2010.

Michael Mazur was a remarkable artist. He left us unflinching visual essays which continue to speak powerfully to me. Over my desk hangs Mazurʼs Closed Ward #3, so I am reminded of Mazur and his subjects every day. There is a brutal realism in much of Mazurʼs output. He gives us an individualʼs unfiltered reaction to parts of our reality which so many choose to either ignore, hide from, or conceal. This approach is not, however, an either/or proposition: what makes Mazurʼs work effective and potent is that the difficult, even horrifying, is often nestled up against the beautiful and the tender. Mazur embraced all of the life around us, in whatever condition he found it. He did so mostly without judgement, and through the haunted faces of his subjects we are able to see and learn something of ourselves.

Michael Hersch (b.1971) is a composer and pianist.

Michael Mazur, Closed Ward #1, used by permission of the Michael Mazur estate

Christopher Cairns: A Short Video

"Age makes no difference, whether a sculpture's 7,000 years old or whether it was just made.  It makes no difference in friendships.  If you've got the temperament, if the temperament's there, that's enough."

Photographer Richard Anderson made this 6-minute video, Chris Cairns on Sculpture, Life, Art, Catastrophe and Music, in the summer of 2010.  Interviewed in his Havertown, Pennsylvania studio against a backdrop of life-sized plaster figures, Cairns talks about art and his friendships with composers George Rochberg and Michael Hersch.  The video images are accompanied by music by Hersch and Rochberg.


Chris Cairns on Sculpture, Life, Art, Catastrophe, and Music from Richard Anderson on Vimeo.

Havertown Studio Open House, May 2010

For two days in early May 2010, sculptor Christopher Cairns, painter Nicholas Cairns, and composer Michael Hersch hosted an art and music open house in Chris’s 9,000-square-foot studio in Havertown, Pennsylvania.

The event, which attracted people from as far away as Massachusetts and Washington, DC, featured sculpture, painting, drawing, film and music.

On display in the multi-room studio were 25 paintings by Nicholas Cairns—including Dies Irae (2009) and Wreckage of Flowers (2009)—20 small prints and about 10 drawings.

                                          Installation, Nicholas Cairns

                                          Installation, Nicholas Cairns

Christopher Cairns presented a near-final version of his Rochbergtorium, an installation honoring his late friend, the composer George Rochberg.  Arranged in a 250-square-foot, skylit room, the Rochbergtorium included 25 sculptural heads of the composer in assorted sizes, styles, and mediums, a 12-minute video interview of Rochberg by Peter Cairns, and a small desk with scores, books and photos.  A recording by Peter Sheppard Skaerved of Rochberg’s Caprice Variations played on a continual loop.

                                                    Rochbergtorium

Elsewhere, Peter Cairns’ 2009 film about an NGO in Haiti, made just five months before the 2010 earthquake, played in a makeshift screening room in one corner of the cavernous studio.

Prints, drawings and watercolors by Alexis Cairns (yours truly) capped off the largely family affair.

A highlight of the event was the May 1^st performance of Michael Hersch’s Sonatas No.s 1 and 2 for unaccompanied cello, played by frequent Hersch collaborator Daniel Gaisford. Of Gaisford, Jay Nordlinger wrote in 2008, “In Daniel Gaisford, Hersch has found an ideal interpreter, an ideal exponent . . . Gaisford has a formidable technique and a formidable mind.  He can make a hundred sounds: fat, thin, spiky, lyrical, rich, sickly, piercing, warm, and Hersch’s sonatas call for a great many of them.”

                                                   Gaisford and Hersch

In a surprising coincidence, a review by Vivian Schweizer of the recording of Hersch’s cello sonatas, played by Gaisford, was printed in the New York Times on May 2^nd.  It read:

Michael Hersch’s Sonata No. 1 for unaccompanied cello is one of his earliest published works, written when he was 23, in 1994 . . . The sonata’s profoundly solitary, rhapsodic first movement veers between yearning lyricism and agitated outbursts. The reflective second movement, a showcase for Mr. Gaisford’s rich, penetrating tone and searing musicality, ebbs and flows into the harmonically rich final movement, with its virtuoso challenges and almost brutal intensity . . . Mr. Gaisford, who, to judge from this recording, deserves greater recognition, also offers a mesmerizing performance of Mr. Hersch’s seven-movement Sonata No. 2, composed in 2000.

                                                     Daniel Gaisford

The intense 70-minute performance took place in a 2,500-square-foot room in the center of the studio building, in front of an audience of about 75.

Artists who attended the open house included Pat Badt, Rick Bechtel, David Carrow, Bruce Colburn, Hilarie Johnston, Steve Larson, Michelle Post, Scott Sherk, Charles Stegeman, Kevin Tuttle, and Elizabeth Wade.

                                     Kevin Tuttle and Michael Cairns

NOTE: the Havertown Studio Open House (now called the Havertown New Music and Art Series) has become a regular event.  Join The Artist Profiles Project on Facebook to be notified of future dates.

 

For more photos of the open house please visit our Flickr page.

Photos above by Richard Anderson (from top, 1 & 2), Margo Cairns (3, 6, 7), and Kevin Tuttle (4 & 5).