- © Ernst Kumpf
Alpine Blues and Musical Poetry
Christian Muthspiel Performs at the ACF
by Anna Gruessinger
Despite the cliché of yodeling Austrians brought to us courtesy of The Sound of Music, the truth is that the average Austrian is about as likely to yodel as an American is to play the blues.
Christian Muthspiel likes to describe yodeling as the blues of the Alps. The custom of cheering and hollering in the mountains has a long history. It has been a popular ritual for centuries, and its complex simplicity is striking.
Christian Muthspiel’s approach to yodeling is definitely untraditional, and it’s also playful. He pays tribute to this unique genre by playing yodel music with non-Alpine instruments and sharing it with musicians who are not likely to wear Lederhosen on a daily basis. Christian Muthspiel will perform with his Austro-European-American Yodel Group on March 1, 2010, at the ACF.
On March 2, 2010, Christian Muthspiel appears at the ACF with his solo performance für und mit ernst. The program is an homage to the Austrian poet Ernst Jandl, one of the most important figures in German language poetry after World War II. Jandl’s work is replete with wordplay, and comes alive when read out loud. In his performance für und mit ernst, Muthspiel invites the audience to experience his imaginative dialogue with the works of the poet.
für und mit ernst was created in 2005 as a commissioned work for the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts, and Culture in conjunction with the Ernst Jandl Prize for Poetry. The program has continued to change and develop since then. Christian Muthspiel considers it a “constant work in progress.” About 30 poems by Jandl, some of them recorded at readings with the poet, are melded with Muthspiel’s music. The meaning of the poetry is enhanced by the music, which in some cases reads between the lines.
Ernst Jandl was a pioneer of sound poetry. Because his poems focus on the phonetic aspects of human speech and pay attention to semantic and syntactic values, they can be understood despite language barriers. For the performance at the ACF, introductory words will help non-German natives understand Jandl’s oeuvre and his impact on the German-language poetry scene.
Ernst Jandl was convinced that poems need to be heard and not only read. Muthspiel’s program introduces another layer of meaning to this concept.
Remember – For the Future
A Musical-Literary Collage
by Michael Lahr
Only those who know the past and are willing to learn from history can shape the future. 2009 we commemorate the 70th anniversary of the beginning of World War II. With the attack on Poland on September 1, 1939, Hitler showed the entire world the brutal, cynical and inhuman face of his National Socialist Regime. The Holocaust Survivor Primo Levi knew how memory and remembrance could serve as a guiding light for our future actions, when he wrote in his memoirs: “It has happened, therefore it can happen again. It can happen everywhere.” With this program Elysium wants to show the artistic and cultural richness of the European-Jewish history.
Among the artists are not only those, who were persecuted because they were Jewish. Many of them were persecuted because they were politically opposed to the Nazi Regime. And with Hans Helfritz we have one composer on the program who was persecuted because of his homosexuality. He fled Germany in 1939 and found a safe haven in South America. In all these individual stories one finds dramatic turns – adventurous escapes often through several countries and even continents – and many heroic deeds, often done by those whose paths crossed with the paths of the persecuted artists, as in the case of Walther Hirschberg, who was hidden for many years by the French sculptor George Salendres in Lyon and thus survived.
An important criterion for the selection of the pieces on this program was, that we specifically wanted to present artists who had lived in countries that were attacked by the Nazis when they started the Second World War. There is, for example, Jehan Ariste Alain from France, there is Karel Berman from Czechoslovakia, and the Czech composer Viteslava Kaprilova, who came to study with Bohuslav Martinu and Nadia Boulanger in Paris and died in France in 1940. There is Ziga Hirschler from Croatia, and then there are the Polish composers Jerzy Fitelberg and Szymon Laks and the Polish poet Antoni Slonimski.
When we did the research and conceived tonight’s program, I often asked myself: Are the works of artists who were persecuted by the Nazis still relevant for us today? What is their relevance, what is their significance? One morning, I opened the New York Times and saw an announcement in the Arts & Leisure section: A theatre group from Ruanda would present the play “The Investigation” at Montclair College in New Jersey. Peter Weiss had written this play in 1964 based on the protocols of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials. And Erwin Piscator, the great theatre innovator, founder of the political theatre in Berlin in the 1920’s, who later became a refugee himself and in his New York exile founded the Dramatic Workshop at the New School, directed the world premiere of Weiss play in 1965 at the Freie Volksbühne in Berlin. By the way, this was one of Piscator’s ground-breaking productions in post-war Germany, a production which helped break the silence in Germany about the Holocaust and helped start a public discussion about Germany’s guilt.
The performance of Peter Weiss’ “The Investigation” by the Rwandan group would be given in a Rwandan tribal dialect with English subtitles. Here you have a group of artists from Africa, looking for ways to deal with the genocide they have experienced in their own country not long ago – and this group refers to the Holocaust in their quest for possible answers. These African artists look for orientation to cope with their own national and political trauma, and they suggest to re-examine a literary work, with which German artists more than 40 years ago tried to deal with the trauma of the Holocaust. I could not have wished for a clearer answer to my question, what relevance the art of composers and writers who were persecuted, banned, and in many cases murdered by the Nazis, has for us today.
