Nautilus Magazine Fall 2024 Issue
The Harrowing and the Beautiful
Composer Michael Hersch on grief, music, and reality
Q & A: Ah Young Hong and Michael Hersch Discuss Creative Synergy, Artistic Challenges, and the Beauty of Collaboration
Throughout his career, composer and pianist Michael Hersch has created a body of work that explores the intensity of terminal illness and the precarity of memory. Soprano Ah Young Hong has frequently collaborated with Hersch on these pieces, bringing a stylistic versatility informed by the late Renaissance and late-20th-century pieces by Milton Babbitt and Morton Feldman. Their early work together started with a critically acclaimed premiere of Hersch’s monodrama On the Threshold of Winter, in 2014, which left audiences stunned and Hong in tears.
" ... an extremely ambitious, difficult and necessary opera that forces humanity to confront the way it mythologizes the dynamics of power and justice ... it is also an opera which I believe has the genuine power to transform the outlooks of receptive audiences ... Poppaea reveals itself to be a mirror unto humanity and the mechanisms by which some of its darkness traits operate. It is, for this reason, an opera which I am very grateful to see in the contemporary repertoire ... a keen and crucial insight into the nature of rage itself."
"Past and present collide in Hersch’s devastating one-act opera ... he zeroes in without hesitation on very modern themes of trauma, resilience, and self-actualization. His longtime collaborator, the genius soprano Ah Young Hong, puts in her finest, most concentrated performance ... Support is too strong a word for the spellbinding work of Steve Davislim (Nero) and Silke Gäng (Octavia), Ensemble Solovoices, and Ensemble Phoenix Basel, conducted by Jürg Henneberger, who all surround Hong with commitment and complexity. Poppaea is a landmark piece and this is a recording to match it." - Jeremy Shatan
A production of Wien Modern, Theater ODEON, and ZeitRäume Basel - Biennale für neue Musik und Architektur.
photo by Susanna Drescher
"... an emotional power and effect that by no means every contemporary score can claim for itself ..."
"... it is the music that - with its subtle, ecstatic pressure - provides the most immediate effect. Hersch combines fragility and expressiveness"
"Disturbing, contemporary music theater of the kind like 'Poppaea' by Michael Hersch used to be a tradition at the Wiener Festwochen. It's good that Vienna is now adopting this genre in a modern way. Even better if it succeeds like the co-production with the ZeitRäume Basel festival at the Odeon. Hersch shows the mistress of the Roman emperor Nero as a Lady Macbeth ... overwhelming, opulent music that pairs perfectly with the verses of Fleischmann's libretto. The percussion, especially the gongs, are used menacingly, the strings shimmer as if electrified. The chorale-like passages in the female choir seem like startling injections."
photo by Delia Burri, Lukas Graf und Adrian Kelterborn – Prismago GmbH
"In this score, Michael Hersch dared to create an expansive as well as an agonising opulence ...The 18-member Ensemble Phoenix Basel sounded as if they were 80-strong ... Ever new individual colours peel out of the lush, crashing waves of the metrics of this score. The brass, sometime after Octavia's slow bleeding, the flute, and the caustically questioning bass clarinet, after the embers of the first piano glimmer from the core of Poppaea and Nero's marital hell ... Like Macbeth, Poppaea gets caught up in the whirlpool of inflicting violence until she herself becomes the victim. In a visionary juxtaposition, Octavia and Poppaea, whose destinies are so similar, prey on each other with a bizarre ambivalence of pity and rivalry."
"the risk was worth it ... the music of Michael Hersch, shocks and touches in equal measure."
"... It was an exceptional, long journey, this concert that began in the night and ended in the same. As the huge room darkened, a weary yet tender poignancy emerged, an effect that one might call spiritual. When leaving, the profanity of the city streets hit me hard."
"... Its sheer 15-hour length would have sufficed to dwarf all other concerts this year ... a maximal experience that was absolutely overwhelming."
"Agatha und der Krebs: Wie es kam, dass der US-amerikanische Komponist Michael Hersch für die Camerata Bern ein so düsteres Stück komponiert hat."
" ... he wrote the monodrama 'On the Threshold of Winter,' which rendered the terror and indignities of terminal illness so viscerally that at its premiere in Brooklyn in 2014, it left the audience shellshocked and the soloist, the soprano Ah Young Hong, in tears. Mr. Hersch is not the first composer to repeatedly deal with death. But he treats it not with sentimentality or exaggeration, but with uncompromising lucidity ... While there is great beauty in the chiaroscuro interplay between his expressionistic dissonances and Renaissance-style harmonies, his works never build toward resolution or transfiguration. A listener is unlikely to experience catharsis or find consolation. Ms. Kopatchinskaja likened Mr. Hersch’s music to a wound. Listening to it, she said, ‘you face this dark side, this shadow and blood. It’s so incredibly direct, it goes into your bones.’ That visceral impact can be uncanny, with powerful cluster chords spewing toxic resonance trails, and the occasional hopeful motif replicating like a faulty cell, its harmonic health uncertain."
Works to include his Violin Concerto, Images from a Closed Ward, and the monodrama On the Threshold of Winter.
SEPT. 11'S MONUMENTAL DESPAIR, EVOKED BY SOLO PIANO
"Claustrophobic and exhilarating at once, with moments of sublime
beauty nestled inside thickets of dark virtuosity, 'Pavilions' is an
extraordinary musical experience and a pianistic masterpiece I would
unhesitatingly place alongside those of Bach and Liszt."
“... both players tested the limits of tonal range and virtuosity on their instruments, while exploring mostly the darker side of human experience.”
Glimpse of a Suffering Soul
"Michael Hersch’s end stages, commissioned and given its New York premiere by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, was a little-relieved cry of anguish and anger in the face of terminal illness and death. But with a faint tolling of orchestral bells and whimpers in the violins at the end of the second movement, attitude gave way to what seemed a touching glimpse of the suffering soul itself."
"the disc’s raw, gripping high point ... shockingly visceral music”
By Alex Ross, The New Yorker
"... violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, this year’s music director, had selected her programs long before December, but they spoke with eerie aptness to a town that had faced an apocalypse ... A world première by the Baltimore-based composer Michael Hersch harrowingly evoked the spread of cancer in a body ... Hersch’s new piece, a seventy-five-minute vocal cycle entitled “I Hope We Get a Chance to Visit Soon,” caused dissent in the legendarily open-minded Ojai audience: some were deeply moved, others repulsed. Its main text is drawn from e-mails that Hersch received from his friend Mary O’Reilly as she was dying of cancer. One soprano declaims these words while another sings settings of poems by Rebecca Elson, who tells of a similar struggle, in more oblique terms. The unvarnished intimacy of O’Reilly’s language—'I had a rather scary conversation with my oncologist'—made it difficult to find aesthetic distance, though this was perhaps the point: we were being shown the raw material for a work of art alongside its poetic elaboration. Hersch’s music is harsh, relentless, and often deliberately lacking in contrast, but it is gripping in its dogged progress. Skilled collaborators joined Kopatchinskaja’s quest. Ah Young Hong and Kiera Duffy were transfixing soloists in the Hersch ..."
"Hersch's "I hope we get a chance to visit soon" employs two sopranos (the Ojai premiere features Ah Young Hong and Kiera Duffy) and nine members of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra led by Tito Muñoz."
Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and composer Michael Hersch discuss his Violin Concerto
“uncompromising brilliance"
Michael Hersch
end stages, Violin Concerto
Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violin,
International Contemporary Ensemble, Tito Muñoz, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
New Focus Recordings fcr208
"What we have here is almost an opera without words; there is the scenery of Weiss and the characters of the performers, but also the fixed motifs running through and appearing like cartouches on an ever changing rock face … Although much of the music is disturbing, even shocking (but never in the mere ‘shock-value ’ sense of the word) the overall effect of this huge but ultimately compact odyssey through the world stripped bare by Weiss ’ images, is one both moving and offering of solace … Despite these scenes of peril, after over 90 minutes between living and dying in Hersch and Weiss ’ world, a curiously cathartic sense is achieved; a sense of something endured yet survived, a procession of bleak images in sound that somehow resist despair. It is to be hoped that this moving work reaches more listeners. Zwischen Leben und Tod is a unique multi-layered creation and if milestones are needed in the violin and piano repertoire, then this surely is one.”
"His music is notable for its startling contrasts, with hauntingly beautiful interludes juxtaposed with dissonant outbursts and interwoven with solitary passages tinged with a Renaissance-flavored melancholy."
