In exploring this song cycle that Sir Harrison Birtwistle based on the poems of Paul Celan, it may be useful to see ways the composer worked as a secondary witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust. In the essay by Dora Apel that I looked at in an earlier blog, Michael Rothberg offers two mutually exclusive strategies for such a viewing. A realist view presumes the Holocaust is knowable and can be translated into a “familiar mimetic universe”; the antirealist analysis refuses any sense of knowability in terms of representation. We find a third strategy that Rothberg calls “traumatic realism,” which may help bridge the gap between the irreconcilable strategies, again by employing a sense of chronological time through the use of ordinary and extraordinary elements to retell the story while bringing into play “contemporary conditions of the telling.” Both Birtwistle and Celan work through these "contemporary conditions of the telling" by using a sense of the uncanny, that is, by disrupting the sense of realism for themselves and for their listeners or readers. These strategies appear over and over for us as techniques of witness whether as primary retellers who have experienced the horror or as secondary witnesses who come to such knowledge through other sources. These markers of the uncanny appear in all the medial forms I will examine in this blog. The short list includes a sense of obsessive repetition; an inability to find sure footing in a world gone wrong, that is, a sense of disorientation in an environment where the witness has become "unhomed"; a sense of fragmentation, and one of being lost in the void, in the abyss.
Music has often played an important role as inspiration and structure for Paul Celan in his poetry. His poem “Todesfuge” references the fugue as a compositional strategy. An early version of the same poem used the word tango in the title instead, “Death Tango.” Several musical composers reversed that inspiration and have worked with Celan’s poetry as basis for their own compositions. Sir Harrison Birtwistle, a modernist, once musical director of the Royal National Theatre in London
Birtwistle uses certain elements in his work to respond to Celan. He has his own versions of structural elements that the poet uses, a sense of cyclical ritual based on rhythm and pulse, of fragmentation, and an evocation of the void. Celan, of course, uses repetitions through out the poem “Todesfuge” to create an incantation of horror. Words repeat, phrases transform. In John Felstiner’s translation, “Black milk” intensifies into a drink of death. “We drink you at midday Death is a master.” Like Celan, Birtwistle uses certain subjects or motifs over and over. These motifs enter one section as brief mention and develop more fully as an inversion in a different section of the composition. Repetition comes with a fugue and anti-fugue sense according to Stephen Pruslin in the liner notes. In the “Todesfuge” section Birtwistle introduces two subjects. Pruslin sees the first of these becoming a “ghost subject” that seems to disappear after being featured only in the harmonics, in something of a “dance of death” (6).
Without going into the complex structure of the whole piece at this point, I can at least comment on the strategy of repeating certain subjects in one section and developing them further in another part of the composition. This sense of fragmentation, of the composition being “sliced,” as Pruslin says, creates a tension while also pressuring the cyclical vocabulary of the music. Perhaps, as Pruslin claims at the end of his essay, there is a sense in a “spirit true to Celan, [that there are] more songs, and more quartet-movements silently sounding." Certainly, we end Celan’s “Todesfuge” with its “Sulamith” vibrating into the void.
The use of this void speaks directly to Birtwistle as he follows Celan's lead into the void we associate in part with the Holocaustal uncanny. As reviewer Paul Griffiths says about the composer's expedition into that world, "Any encounter with Celan must have to do with death," a given which causes these songs to "come not from piling on the pressure but from looking somewhere else, to where the poet knew songs could be found." That somewhere else, which Griffiths speaks of in terms of "uncanny riddling," functions differently in terms of representation from other art forms we will look at, perhaps because the composer's entry point comes through in English translation. His first acquaintance with the poems is through Michael Hamburger's translation. As an act of representation, Birtwistle remains several steps removed from the memory functionally created by the poems. Language, nationality, and generation separate him from Celan's poetry of witness. Born in 1934 in rural Lancashire, England, he joined a military band as a child. His understanding of the poem and of the Holocaust comes as the world, undertook the task of understanding, not as German or Jew. Musically Birtwistle moves into Celan's world as a secondary witness. Nevertheless, the uncanny that works through the the composer's atonal phrasings leads him to a place in which the review sees that "Sir Harrison is at once at home and a stranger, on a shore--the poem's shore--where what is anciently familiar is the same as what has just been washed new by the last wave."
The use of this void speaks directly to Birtwistle as he follows Celan's lead into the void we associate in part with the Holocaustal uncanny. As reviewer Paul Griffiths says about the composer's expedition into that world, "Any encounter with Celan must have to do with death," a given which causes these songs to "come not from piling on the pressure but from looking somewhere else, to where the poet knew songs could be found." That somewhere else, which Griffiths speaks of in terms of "uncanny riddling," functions differently in terms of representation from other art forms we will look at, perhaps because the composer's entry point comes through in English translation. His first acquaintance with the poems is through Michael Hamburger's translation. As an act of representation, Birtwistle remains several steps removed from the memory functionally created by the poems. Language, nationality, and generation separate him from Celan's poetry of witness. Born in 1934 in rural Lancashire, England, he joined a military band as a child. His understanding of the poem and of the Holocaust comes as the world, undertook the task of understanding, not as German or Jew. Musically Birtwistle moves into Celan's world as a secondary witness. Nevertheless, the uncanny that works through the the composer's atonal phrasings leads him to a place in which the review sees that "Sir Harrison is at once at home and a stranger, on a shore--the poem's shore--where what is anciently familiar is the same as what has just been washed new by the last wave."
This sense of the uncanny, along with the repetitions, and the use of the void, that is, what cannot be said, the people who are gone, the emptiness, and desolation, the use of silence, all of these play an important role in both music and poetry. In this music of secondary witness, time always plays an integral role. In Birtwistle’s case he uses it to create a “terrible beauty,” a term the translator Michael Hamburger used to express his feelings about the poetry by Celan that he was translating. As I listen to the music, I feel disoriented, stressed. The atonality pressures me as does Celan's language. There is a story here, but I can't reach the narrative. There is a grief beyond understanding.
