°*A Life in Music*°

DANIEL BARENBOIM
WIENER PHILHARMONIKER

Sonntag, 23. July, 21.00 Uhr

Grosses Festspielehaus

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791)
Symphonie D-Dur KV385
Haffner-Symphonie

JOANNES MARIA STAUD (*1974)
Segue
Musik fur Violoncello und Orchester (2006)
Auftragswerk der Salzburger Festspiele
Urauffuhrung

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Konzerte fur Klavier und Orchester
B-Dur KV 595

DIRIGENT UND KLAVIER
Daniel Barenboim

VIOLONCELLO
Heinrich Schiff

WIENER PHILHARMONIKER
AKKORDEON Krassimir Sterev

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IT FOLLOWS, IT GOES ON…
On Segue. Musik fur Violoncello und Orchester

When one tells other that one is working on a piece for cello and orchestra, one not infrequently encounters the reply, “Ah, you mean a cello concerto?” “No!” I say, “not a cello concerto! It is Music for Cello and Orchestra.” At the beginning, this was, perhaps, merely a term of convenience for me.
Naturally, I could have named the work Piece for Violoncello and Orchestra – or quite simply Cello and Orchestra, as Morton Feldman, to give one example, named a work. Or I could have decided on such titles – retro-modern, after a fashion – as Confrontation, Constellation, …(con)cert(are)…or have made the – totally postmodern – choice of Symphonic Sketch for Violoncello and Orchestra. Yet from the start the word Music presented itself to me as the most inspirational, the personally most strongly liberating point of departure for my own work of invention. Free of value judgments, containing no formal expectations or attitudes, no self-indulgent knobbiness, no foreground historic points of contact, but merely: Music for Violoncello and Orchestra.

But why not a Concerto? Anyone who is passionate about music has very specific ideas about his term. Some people, namely specialists, like to trace the term “concerto” back to the Medieval Latin and Italian “concertare” (“to sound together”, “to work together”) or to the Latin “concertare” (“to dispute”, “to settle by argument”) and make reference to the works of the composers who first used this designation. Examples include the concerti of Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieliand Heinrich Schutz’s Kleine geistliche Konzerte. Following Arcangelo Corelli’s further deveopment of the form into the Concerto grosso, Antonio Vivaldi took the genre of the concerto and established, alongside the combination of “solo and accompaniment”, the dominant three-movement form of fast-slow-fast. A true success story of Classical, Romantic, and classic modern music, the concerto has been the form of many great works, and it is regarded today as a high point in the story of Western music.

A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

What now, then, for a composer of today who no longer wishes to follow this formal model? Very well, one may make the objection that Liszt and Saint-Saens developed rhapsodic one-movement concerto forms on the 19th century. Or that, in the early 20th, Busoni left behind a many-movement monster that burst the genre wide open. None of these composers, however, was ready to entirely leave behind the sonata form which had exerted so lasting an inflluence in shaping the development of the concerto. It has only been sunce the irreversible abandonment of major-minor tonality – and with it the functional harmony that had shaped music until that time – that new musical forms emerged, each still calling itself “concerto”, and which were conceived as further developments, more or less stringent, of the traditional type (the concerti, for example, of Bartòk, Webern, Maderna, Zimmermann, and Dutilleux). Or they represented the utter negation, often hued with irony, of the concerto, with nothing left over of the erstwhile bourgeois showpiece but the name (as, for example, with Cage). Little by little, however, particularly after the disastrous neo-tonal wave of the 1970s and 1980s, the designation “concerto” took on a stale and flat flavor. And if my own new work bears no similarity at all to the concerto form (which I today no longer view as authentic) – why should I call it that?

The first word in the title, Segue (Italian: “It follows”), is conventionally used in musical terminology for a continuation of a musical work on the next page of the score. Here the term stands as a poetic symbol of my intention not to confront, while composing, a form that has become anachronistic. The series of events then becomes singular, subject only to a dramaturgy immanent to the work. And naturally Segue. Musik fur Violoncello und Orchester also plays with the ear’s expectations for traditional formal developments and with breaking them, with continuity and contrast, with surprise and stringency. Seemingly new material has in fact introduced long before, unnoticeably, as it were subcutaneously, and this material stands in contrast to musical situations that are ostensibly familiar, yet reveal themselves in the course of the work to be new. This focuses both the cello solo and the orchestra tutti – and all possible mixed forms in between. The negation of the concerto form influencesthe creation of every tiny germ of musical growth.

The total duration of the work is approximately 19 minutes. It is made up of four major sections, highly variable in length, but subject to an overarching ratio of proportions. The point of departure for this work was an unfinished sketch by Mozart, an Andantino for Violoncello and Keyboard Instrument, K. A 46 (374g). To be sure, this sketch is used in Segue. Musik fur Violoncello und Orchester neither as an alienating element (as for example in the polystylistic sense) nor as a shadowy reminiscence of a supposedly instead will not yet be revealed.

A MIRROR OF SOCIETY

Segue – it follows, it goes on – is not least a reference to the fact thet there are and always will be new and unusual things in art (as a mirror of society, too). What is, at first glance, foreign and unknown, indeed uncanny, often turns out to be, on closer inspection, something immensely enriching, and which broadens our horizons – just as immigration gives to every country people from other cultural spheres. A country of music should of course be aware of its artistic tradition, but not in a museum-like, but rather in a constructive, sense. It needs its great composers of the past just as it depends on its outstanding musicians in the present. For a tradition, however, to remain a living tradition, to make a tradition for tomorrow, a country above all needs artists working in the here and now – a fact that all too often goes forgotten. He who denies the new its right to exist, who is content, solely and alone, to consume the past, wormed over, over and over again (like the 459th La Traviata with an all-star cast), is like a gourmand who stuffs himself daily with his favorite dish, then withers away from malnutrition.

This work is dedicated to Heinrich Schiff, in solidarity.

JOHANNES MARIA STAUD
Born in Innsbruck in 1974, studied composition in Vienna and Berlin from 1994 to 2001, also attending the master courses of, among others, Brian Ferneyhough and Alois Pino. He is a confounder of the composers’ collective Gegenklang in Vienna. He was a recipient in 1999-2000 of a grant from the Alban Berg Foundation and in 2003-04 from the Heinrich Strobel Foundation of the SWR in Freiburg. Mr.Staud is a multiple prize-winner, including the Composition Prize of the Salzburg Easter Festival (2002) and the first Prize for Polygon in the category of composers under the age of 30 at the 2003 International Rostrum of Composers.

Ricordo del viaggio più importante della mia vita.