The Concert Hall as a Bunker

Patricia Kopatchinskaja has given the title Dona nobis pacem (“Grant us peace”) to the staged concert that she has developed specifically for Lucerne Festival Forward 2024 (15 to 17 November) in collaboration with the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Leaders. The Latin title ties in with the piece by Galina Ustvolskaya that opens the program – and which, initially, hardly sounds like peace. For her “Composition No. 1: Dona nobis pacem” from 1970–71, the Russian composer chose the unusual instrumentation of piccolo flute, tuba, and piano. The highest and lowest wind instruments are thus juxtaposed, exhausting extremes of register – shrill cries here, deep, threatening gestures there – while fist and forearm are used to attack the piano. Not until the very end does the music reach a state resembling an internal prayer.

“Like an explosion in my head” is how Patricia Kopatchinskaja once described the effect of Galina Ustvolskaya’s works. “When you hear this music, it changes your life: nothing sounds the same afterwards. It’s as if you were in the midst of an earthquake, on the edge of an abyss; like a force of nature, this music can kill. Everyone should listen to something by Galina Ustvolskaya at least once in their life; she is a necessity in our time.”

In her new staged concert Dona nobis pacem, Patricia Kopatchinskaja is concerned with a similarly transformative musical experience: shocked by the wars around the world that currently dominate the news, she imagined the concert hall as “a bunker where you seek shelter together, while the world outside is ending.” She wondered: “What is it like not to know what to expect? How long does it take for death to arrive? How do people who cannot protect themselves survive? I wanted to know what effect music has on us in such a situation. What music can be played and heard under such circumstances? What kinds of sounds can comfort us? What do we remember? What gives hope, what reflects fears, dreams, despair, anger? Do you sing a children’s song to yourself – or maybe say a prayer? And does music even make sense when you are fighting for your life?”

Patricia Kopatchinskaja has therefore chosen works that reflect a wide range of different experiences of violence – historical and contemporary, military, religious, and racist. Here are three highlights:

Blaise Ubaldini takes us back to the time of the First World War. His Rusty Song commemorates the French lieutenant Henri Herduin, who was executed without trial on 11 June 1916 for ordering a retreat and thus saving the lives of the remnants of his company in one of the murderous battles for Verdun, who were surrounded, without ammunition or reinforcements. He was accused of abandoning the battlefield without orders. A few hours before his execution (which he was ordered to carry out himself), he wrote a moving letter to his wife. This text precedes the score, since it is to be read aloud at performances. Ubaldini desires to commemorate Henri Herduin, “to give him a touch of life by summoning him among us, giving him a voice, and listening to him.”

“My beloved little wife! We have, as I told you, suffered a failure. My entire battalion was taken by the Germans – except for me and a few men. Now, Colonel Bernard calls us cowards, as if we could have held out with thirty or forty men like eight hundred! Now I am resigned to my fate, I have no shame. But before I die, my good Fernande, I think of you and little Luc. Claim my pension, you are entitled to it. I have a clear conscience, I want to die commanding the firing squad in front of my crying men. I kiss madly you for the last time. After my death, sue the military justice system. The head honchos are still looking for those responsible, and they will find them because they want to exonerate themselves! My adored treasure, I give you a huge kiss, thinking of our past happiness, I kiss my son, who will not have to be ashamed of his father, who had done all his duty. To think that this is the last time I write to you. Oh! my beautiful angel, be courageous, think of me, and I will give you my last and eternal kiss! Goodbye, I love you! I will be buried in the Bois de Fleury, north of Verdun. The abbot will be able to give you all the information.”

Just as “war sucks humanity out of life,” Ubaldini begins Rusty Song with indeterminate pitches: music emptied of “harmonic content.” Out of this “cold and empty sound world,” the “memory of a lullaby” gradually emerges. To create this, Ubaldini cites text fragments from Franz Schubert’s famous Wiegenlied (“Lullaby”). “It’s a way to invoke his soul, as he is so dear to me, and I feel secure when I know he’s roaming around,” he says. Ubaldini also uses a lullaby written in 1914 by Debussy’s contemporary Déodat de Séverac: Ma poupée chérie. “My mother would sing it to me when I was a child, and she got it from her mother. It’s the first musical emotion I can remember.”

But why include lullabies at all? Because they are also war songs, according to Ubaldini: “How many orphan lullabies have been sung by devastated mums to their children?”

Hannah Kendall addresses a very different context in which we find violence: the context of racism and colonialism. The Black composer, who studied in New York with such mentors as Georg Friedrich Haas and George Lewis and received the Hindemith Prize in 2022, was born in London in 1984. Her parents come from the former British colony of Guyana. In many of her works, Kendall deals with the suffering of the African diaspora. Tuxedo: Dust Bowl #3 is a “meditative lamentation; a communal expression of grief, loss, displacement and despair; of being in the wilderness, the desert, a dust bowl, where all is dried up and destroyed.”

Kendall prefaces her score with verses from the biblical book of Joel. They impressively describe the devastation caused by a plague of locusts in Judah:

The fields are ruined,
the ground is dried up;
the grain is destroyed,
the new wine is dried up,
the olive oil fails
Despair, you farmers,
wail you vine growers;
grieve for the wheat and the barley
Because the harvest of the field
is destroyed.
The vine is dried up
and the fig tree is withered;
the pomegranate, the palm and the
apple tree –
all the trees of the field – are dried up.
Surely the people’s joy
is withered away.
(Joel 1:10-12)

Tuxedo: Dust Bowl #3 (the title of Kendall’s Tuxedo series alludes to a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat) is designed as an open work: anyone can perform it, and in any conceivable location – indoors or outdoors, ideally distributed throughout the space. It is left to the performers to decide whether to sing just the pure harmonica version or the optional vocal part as well, or even to have the score played by a whole orchestra. They also have a relatively free hand in how to execute the prescribed chords. The harmonica, according to Kendall, is “an instrument associated with Afro-diasporic sorrow, creates a brutal and harsh sound world symbolic of the plantations.”

If Kendall’s piece is about lament and uprooting, Samir Odeh-Tamimi makes violence very tangible and vivid in Li-Sabbrá. Born in 1970 in Jaljulia near Tel Aviv to Palestinian parents, Odeh-Tamimi came to Germany as a 23-year-old. His 2005 piece for saxophone and percussion, performed in Lucerne in a saxophone version, recalls the massacre carried out by Christian militias in September 1982 in the Palestinian camps of Sabbrá and Shatila in the south of the Lebanese capital Beirut. Under the noses of the Israeli army, which controlled Beirut at the time, they slaughtered hundreds of unarmed civilians. The eruption of violence, the screams of the victims, their panic: all of this can be heard in Odeh-Tamimi’s music. Strokes of the tam-tam become louder and louder, as if they were getting closer, while there are violent outbursts from the saxophone and relentless blows from the timpani.

Malte Lohmann (translated by Thomas May)