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Songs by Mikis Theodorakis rearranged for voice and piano by Sebastian Schwabgerman adaptation by Ina Kutulas© SCHOTT MUSIC GmbH & Co. KGProduced by Asteris Koutoulas
Co-Produced by BR Classic
by Alexander Smoltczyk
On 7 August 2012, four musicians were sitting in an Athens apartment. They had met just shortly before. Through the window, one could see the Acropolis. “It’s so beautiful”, the eldest of the four said, but he was not referring to the Parthenon. I only knew Theodorakis from my mother’s record collection
Mikis Theodorakis held an
unlit cigar in his left hand, a present from
the Cuban government, and used the Havana to conduct the freshly
printed score that had just been placed in front of him: the first of
thirteen songs he’d written, recomposed by the then 19-year-old Munich
composer and violinist Sebastian Schwab, played by the pianist Markus
Zugehör, and sung by Johanna Krumin, a young soprano from Berlin. The
project had been her idea. An impossible idea: for Theodorakis’s 90th
birthday, a number of his songs were to be reincarnated, retexted, and
recomposed by younger artists, by musicians who could be his
grandchildren.
For them, everything Theodorakis had fought for was
ancient history: the years of war, the partisan battles, the resistance
to the military junta, the fight for a free Greece. For Theodorakis,
these were defining life experiences; for the younger ones, it was
material in history books, as old and musty as the Merovingians. “I
only knew Theodorakis from my mother’s record collection”, says
Sebastian Schwab. A whole generation separates these musicians; by all
rights this should not have functioned. And yet: “After the first song,
when Mikis said what he did, all my doubts disappeared. Out of the
legend, a contemporary person emerged; someone with whom I could talk
about harmonies, voice- leading, and musical transitions. For me, it
was again proof that music can transcend time.”
For three days, the four
musicians met in Theodorakis’s apartment. For
Johanna Krumin, it was like a master class: “Mikis sang for us,
conducted, interrupted, corrected. Every detail was important to him.”
It was a stroke of luck to meet a conductor “with so much wrist”, who
could express legato, sound, and expression without any fear of losing
control: “There’s pure sound in those hands.”
Mikis Theodorakis has
always understood music to be something
transcendent, like a cosmic melody, which every composer takes from the
work of others and passes on. For this reason, Theodorakis had no
problem with this project.
Johanna Krumin chose the
thirteen pieces from Theodorakis’s works. The
poet Ina Kutulas had already long been involved with the preparation of
singable translations of Theodorakis’s songs and had also written
original texts of her own (here for Abschied [Farewell] and Medeas
Entsagung [Medea’s Renunciation]). Sebastian Schwab began by
improvising at the piano using Theodorakis’s melodies. “I had to make
the melodies match the speech rhythms of the German text”, Schwab said.
“That began already with the word ‘musiki’, which in Greek has its
accent on the last syllable.”
The sixth song – Wie geheimnisvoll schön meine Liebste ist [How Beautiful Is My Beloved] (from the Song of Songs) part of the Mauthausen Cycle – is for Theodorakis an invocation of a deceased lover, in which pathos is given full rein. Schwab, however, wanted his music to be “relentlessly unchanging and harsh in its harmonies”. He reached back to the “passus duriusculus” (a melody or bass line consisting of a chromatic scale covering the interval of a fourth, a figuration drawn from the Baroque doctrine of affects), and let this procession of pain move chromatically through all the parts, “like a traumatic backdrop for the soft and gentle melody; the background finally joins itself with the melody, because the melody provides support – without the emergence of angry outbursts – and finally, resigned, fades away.” Baroque submission instead of secular invocation – it was surely not coincidental that Wie geheimnisvoll schön meine Liebste ist was the only song on which the two composers – one very old and one quite young – could not and cannot agree.
Schwab
describes Fortunas
Gewässer [Fortune’s Waters] as one of his two
favorite pieces. It is not set contrapuntally: the voice provides the
accompaniment; the music floats over the melody and weaves itself
gently into the melodic fabric. Bright light and sand on a shore
provide healing for the grieving spirit. Theodorakis liked it so much
that he said he could no longer imagine the original accompaniment.
As a composition, Esmeralda
is perhaps the most challenging piece:
nightmarish, in short segments with many ornaments, bizarre bird calls,
and unexpected outbursts. One never knows what will happen next, the
rudder can shift suddenly at any moment.
In Oft
sprichst du zu mir [Often you speak to me], the beloved is
heard. The music becomes soft and gentle, its movement steady and
unchanging. In the following song, Abschied,
it distances itself from
this world and slowly feels its way into a new one. But the ego remains
trapped in this world. The music ends with the deep tolling of bells.
Only music and dance
(Betörendes Lied [Beguiling
Song]) remain to make
life bearable for a lonely and grieving person. The music vanishes with
a rising question mark.
“Before beginning this
project, I mostly knew Theodorakis’s classical
music”, Sebastian Schwab observes. “I knew a little bit about his
political engagement from books. Through his songs, however, I begin to
feel what he perhaps wanted at the time, what he fought for. I feel
there his introspective side.”
This project has become a
homecoming. Mikis Theodorakis has had to move
through the century in the manner of a political hero, has had to give
the Greeks a musical form and voice. Now, at the end of a long life, he
can return to his beginnings, to a pure music free from all external
constraints.
Alexander Smoltczyk
English translation by John Patrick Thomas and W. Richard Rieves