United Kingdom Goebbels: Musicians from the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Dunedin Consort / Ellie Slorach (conductor). Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 12.10.2023. (SRT)
Heiner Goebbels – Songs of Wars I Have Seen
It is very difficult to classify Songs of Wars I Have Seen. It is not a conventional concert, but it isn’t exactly a piece of music theatre either. It is profound but infuriating; purportedly deep but also baffling. And it melds musical styles in so flagrant a manner that it is both a masterpiece of synthesis and a blast of provocation.
Heiner Goebbels’s piece fuses together modern and period instruments to create a soundscape that weaves its way around readings from the wartime diary entries of Gerturde Stein. Stein’s diaries are alternately momentous and banal, and that is what drew Goebbels to them. She spends much of them talking about honey, chickens or the fun of reading Shakespeare; yet she can switch to tales of loss, devastation and bombardment. What attracted Goebbels to her is that ‘she doesn’t decide for you what is important or not. She talks with the same intensity about various personal private things and very heavy political catastrophes.’ Therefore, in the words of the programme note, Stein ‘tells us what is happening without telling us how to feel about it’, and so Goebbels says we need music that will ‘trust in our own option to judge.’
That is a laudable aim, albeit somewhat intangible. In addressing it, however, Goebbels also ends up addressing the void that sits at the centre of both Stein’s words and his own music. It is initially rather shocking to hear that Stein’s wartime experience mostly focuses on passing the time and finding something good to eat: how could she feel this way when such era-defining atrocities were being perpetrated in her own time? On reflection, however, there is something rather humane about seeing her approach a range of topics that, basically, constitute getting through each day. Reductive as that might be, it is also identifiable; and anyway, how much could she really have known? We come at the Second World War knowing how its story ends and conscious of the scale of the whole thing, but Stein could not have grasped any of that in 1940s Vichy France. Perhaps her diaries were simply a way of helping her to cope with the enormity of the moment in which she was marooned.
The music is as episodic as Stein’s writing. In his ensemble of nineteen players, Goebbels creates a soundscape that fuses the modern instruments of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra with the historically authentic instruments of the Dunedin Consort. The music, therefore, flits between worlds and plays with electronic soundscapes and non-musical sounds. The whole thing, therefore, resembles a collage, and that is also true of the music itself which is a smash-up of elements so open that they can suggest whatever you want to hear in them. I thought I caught snatches of Weimar cabaret, samba, rhythmic pounding, abstract electronica and much more besides. Most strikingly, baroque quotations from the music of Matthew Locke flow in and out of Goebbels’s modernism and intensify the sense of a constantly shifting kaleidoscope.
So it’s interesting, but nevertheless it all left me rather unsatisfied, and predominantly somewhat cold. Despite the variety it is very static. Not much actually progresses, and setting up the stage to look like a living room was an idea that went nowhere. Furthermore, spending so much time with Stein’s musings eventually becomes enervating. The banal tends to displace the profound, and that rubbed off on my perception of the music, which became variety for its own sake rather than having much to say. The final moments shook me out of my torpor a little: a haunting trumpet solo from RSNO principal Christopher Hart that rang out over a tintinnabulating accompaniment of bells and (I think) singing bowls. It was beautiful, bit a rare moment of clarity in a fractured smorgasbord. After all, if the void is the point, then has the piece really said anything worthwhile at all?
Simon Thompson
In Perth 13 October and Glasgow 14 October: for information click here.