Helmut Lachenmann (Stuttgart, Germany; 1935), who had his start in music singing in the local church choir, wrote his first compositions while still an adolescent. He studied piano and composition at the Stuttgarter Musikhochschule where he would later hold the post of Professor of Composition, between 1981 and 1999. From 1958 to 1960, he was a pupil of Luigi Nono in Venice, and in 1965 started work at the University of Ghent’s electronic music studio before centering his attention on purely instrumental music.
He has taught regularly on the Darmstadt summer courses and in 2008 was appointed Visiting Professor in the Music Department of Harvard University. During his time there, he also held the position of composer-in-residence at Oberlin College. The name Helmut Friedrich Lachenmann is closely associated with “concrete instrumental music”, a step beyond the “musique concrète” developed by Pierre Schaeffer in 1948.
In 2008, he received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in honor of his life’s work: an output that runs from operas like Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern (The Little Matchgirl) through to orchestral works in diverse formats. He was later named Officer of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2011) and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the government of France (2012).
Speech
Contemporary Music, 3rd edition
If 1935 was a watershed year in European history, and history in general, it was even more so for Germany. It was in this troubled year, in Stuttgart, that Helmut Lachenmann was born. His father was a Protestant pastor, like his own father before him, who aside from his religious calling was also a gifted organist and composer. Together, he and his wife, a talented amateur pianist, instilled a love of music in the young Helmut. Lachenmann had seven brothers and sisters, the eldest of whom died in Holland on active service just a few days before the war ended. He still carries in his memory a succession of images from those times, like his parents’ grief and the American and British air raids on his hometown. “I remember the Nazis’ anti Jewish propaganda. My father was radically opposed to the Nazi regime, but couldn’t say so to his children, as that would put them in danger.”
The next snapshots in his metaphorical album show him after the war, receiving piano lessons and singing Baroque and Renaissance music in a boys’ choir. “From a very young age, I wanted to be a musician, a pianist, a composer…” Immediately after high school, firm in his ambition, he entered the Stuttgarter Musikhochschule, where his teachers included the past master of counterpoint Johann Nepomuk David. It was there he became interested in new music creation, initiating a body of work “based on an intimate knowledge of the musical past, which has enlarged the world of sounds during the last fifty years in a way unmatched by any other contemporary composer,” in the words of the 2010 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award jury in the Contemporary Music category.
In 1957, he found himself attending the Darmstadt summer courses. “There I met Stockhausen, Berio, Maderna, Pousseur, Adorno, and some of the great figures of the Vienna of those days, like Gertrud Schoenberg, Helena Berg, Rudolf Kolisch, Eduard Steuermann or Hermann Scherchen. The following year, in 1958, I was able to meet Ligeti, Cage, Krenek… And I also went to the Donaueschingen festival, not far from my home.” But it was in summer 1957 that he came into contact with the man who would shape his future career: Luigi Nono. “He invited me to study composition with him in Venice and I accepted.” Between 1958 and 1960, he became the star pupil, and friend, of the creator of such seminal works as Il canto sospeso.
Lachenmann had words of admiration for his former maestro on hearing the news of the award: “Luigi Nono is still one of the most alive composers of our time, despite being twenty years dead. He taught me that the concept of music is defined ex novo in every work, when we decide what it is we wish to express, leaving behind old notions anchored in tonality in order to pursue the adventure of art.” Acknowledging of course the ideological and aesthetic differences between the two men. Nono was an avowed communist, with many high-profile contacts. “I was seen as a left-leaning artist, radical in my own way, expanding the idea of music towards what I called ‘concrete instrumental music’, which uses pitch in a provocative way radically different from how it was then understood.”
After his Venetian period he settled in Munich, and in 1963 married the graphic artist Annette Buettner, with whom he had three children. With his second wife, Japanese pianist Yukiko Sugawara, he had two more daughters. It was with Yukiko in mind that he wrote the piano work Serynade, and the longer concerto performed in Madrid last year during the cycle that Xavier Güell titled “Universo Lachenmann”.
From 1969 onwards, the composer’s career became a succession of “scandals,” as he calls them, with orchestras at times forced to abandon in mid-performance. This occurred in Frankfurt in 1969, in Munich in 1971, in Warsaw in 1976, at the Donaueschingen festival in 1980, and subsequent concerts in West Berlin and France. “My music is in equal measure esteemed and misunderstood, loved and hated as a brand of political art; the subversive, meta-structuralist protest of a leftwing composer. I have never actually believed in political music, although inviting society to open its ears and aesthetic horizons must be political in part. Be that as it may, my music has earned growing respect and is now regularly programmed in five continents.”
Between 1989 and 1996, Lachenmann wrote his opera Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern (The Little Matchgirl), based on the Hans Christian Andersen tale but writing into the plot a letter from the terrorist Gudrun Ensslin of the German Federal Republic, and a passage from Leonardo da Vinci on the fear and desire inspired by the dark and mysterious cave. Quite unexpectedly, this piece obtained a legendary success in Hamburg, Stuttgart, Paris, Tokyo and Vienna, where it was performed in full, as well as being played in concert version in Salzburg, Berlin, Frankfurt and Madrid. In succeeding years, it would return as an opera to Berlin and Frankfurt.
Lachenmann combines his creative labors with the teaching of composition in Hannover, Basel and Stuttgart, as well as taking part in courses, seminars and other educational encounters across Europe, the Far East, Latin America and the United States. His publishing output includes the collection of writings Musik als existentielle Erfahrung whose second volume is due out next year. He has also been the subject of numerous essays in many different languages.
He can often be found at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, an intellectual meeting place for lawyers, sociologists, mathematicians, biologists… “I’m the odd man out there, but they like what I do, because they feel they are missing something. Perhaps a sense of fantasy. And I also enjoy conversing with them, because they help me rethink what I’m doing.”
At age seventy-five, Lachenmann is free to indulge in his favorite pastimes. Among them walking, being alone, playing piano or reading the great philosophers, including those of the Kyoto school. He also finds time to study the tradition of European religions as “logocentric paradise and logocentric prison,” and to explore religions and cultures beyond the Old Continent. Not only that, with the encouragement of the 2010 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Contemporary Music, he declares himself ready to overcome the mandatory creative block of a man of his years and start “writing music to the standard expected of me.”
