Between Hersch and Weiss: Sound and Image

Not sonatas by Mozart, Beethoven and Franck.  With encores by Sarasate and W. Kroll.  Not a five minute world derniere buried between warhorses.  But a 22 movement cycle for violin and piano.  Extremes of tempi, technique, perhaps even endurance.  And accompanying paintings: depictions of loneliness, asylums, war, prisons, cannibalism, but also a string quartet, a garden concert, a boy in the grounds of a country house.  Not your normal violin and piano recital then.  Here is a stage set: the two instruments, yes, but also a screen for projecting the images of painter and playwright, Peter Weiss.  And a sound world at first tentative, fragmented, but one that ultimately coheres as it progresses, revealing itself as a rich counterpoint to images and expression.  This is the work I heard just yesterday (15th November 2018) at St. John’s Smith Square, a work played with expressive and scarcely believable virtuosity by violinist Peter Sheppard Skærved and pianist Roderick Chadwick. 

The composer Michael Hersch wrote his Zwischen Leben und Tod as a cycle to the paintings of Weiss, not I think as mere description of images but as a way of exploring the musical realisations of, as Hersch himself puts it, ‘color and motion, of proportion’.  This suggests a deeper engagement with image than might be the case with a programmatic approach.  This isn’t to imply that the music is dispassionate, quite the contrary, more that it seeks to plunge to an essence - how sound and image interact, one might almost say on the level of the vibrational spectrum.  Yet, thoroughly engaged is sound to picture, viscerally so.

At first the instruments seem to lay out rules for engagement.  Placid double stops on the violin, plucked strings on the piano, harsh explosions of discord, stillness, senza espressivo-ghosts.  A sense in which certain pitches remain locked into specific behaviours.  Gestures in search of coherence or brushstrokes of a painter unsure what to paint.  As the work progresses it becomes apparent that these gestures return, not bound by the surface structure determined by the 22 Weiss pictures, but threaded through - an additional interleaving that runs in and out of what the listener might perceive otherwise as 22 discrete entities.  This entwinement a kind of musical double helix.  The gestures retain character and even pitch fixity regardless of the context in which each is found. 

It becomes clearer throughout the work that ‘gesture’ is not merely a metaphorical descriptor; there is a tendency for the very nature of sound production to force the musicians into postures distinct to each sound, whether a certain contortion of the violinist as an extreme double stop is essayed, or the twisting of the body of the pianist as strings are plucked or harmonics obtained from inside the piano.  I thought of Beckett’s extreme directions for the actor in Not I – as if posture and expression are fused.  This shaping of the bodies of the performers by the material itself is an additional expressive layer and becomes more noticeable with time; in movements like the disturbing Cannibal Kitchen, the contortions of the performers seem to parody the lopped limbs and whetted cleavers of Weiss’ painting.  Short, stabbing, yet somehow futile flicks of sul ponticello or snaps of piano strings put bodies into positions suggestive of dismemberment. Sounds are wrenched into garish crescendo; several of these finding the violinist throwing his torso down to knee level as if about to self-dislocate at the hips.

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 - not really in the manner of a leitmotif technique as in Wagner but rather like a frieze that is glimpsed through the surface plot of the opera.  An aloof set of carved figures that only stand for themselves.  A mute hierarchy.   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.  The little modal chord figures, the open strings that plaintively grate over them, the hints of Bach (Sheppard Skaeved confirmed the presence of Bach’s Eb minor Prelude as a musical sign – perhaps just one of the Baroque hints I was able to pick up), the wisps of folk song, the lullaby figures – all these are a welcome balm to sooth the sores of an atrocity exhibition.  What tenderness amid the haunted landscapes! – the hints of succour in the wasted colours of In the Courtyard of the Asylum, or the violin’s keening sixths and thirds of In the Backyard falling over the piano’s intervals like a slowly tipped bowl of apples. 

In case the impression given here is of an etiolated display of anaemic shadows, it ought to be pointed out that Hersch knows when to jolt the listener out of the starved reverie; there are two huge boluses of clotted action: The Machines Attack Mankind and The Great World Theatre.  Here the two instruments tumble over each other in a dizzying display of moto perpetuo madness – an Hieronymus Bosch world of orgiastic symbolism physically realised in sound and posture.  Tonalities racing headlong into ravines.  Arpeggiated lunacy.  Paganini turned inside out.  Alkan clinging to the apocryphal bookcase.  A raucous kettle-ing of material whose only escape is collapse into puffs of rosin and clusters of pianistic evaporation.

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.    

©David Hackbridge Johnson