"Vers la flamme"
An Essay on the Composer Jan Müller-Wieland
(Prof. em. Peter Becker | Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover)
A creative point of departure was granted to present-day composers in their
mid-forties that, with its signum of freedom and pluralistic variety,
must have seemed as liberating as it was disturbing. Jan Müller-Wieland, born
in 1966 in Hamburg and Professor of Composition at the Munich Academy of Music
since 2007, is one of these. To be more precise: he is one of those who have
made the terse diagnosis of the times "everything in the flow!" the motto
of their artistic production, opposing it to the tempting post-modern slogan
"anything goes!" This metaphor refers to a conception of musical poetics that
owns up to the historicity of art, meaning its origins and significance for
the future: "I am interested in music that looks ahead through the retrospective
view. A future without a past is inconceivable for me." (J.M.-W.) Thus the
composer locates his production in the great stream of history, just as, on
the other hand, histories are inscribed in many of his works (including the
instrumental music), communicating to the listener more or less as a narrative
residua: "All my pieces are rhapsodies." Three mentors - Friedhelm Döhl, Hans
Werner Henze and Oliver Knussen - each from his own aesthetic position, accompanied
the years or travel and apprenticeship of Müller-Wieland who, encouraged with
numerous prizes and stipends, would soon find his way to the creative eruptions
of the years of mastery. The early works already show that this "flow" would
not degenerate into the mainstream. Without any fear of contact and with a
palpable zest for the humorous breaking of taboos - already in his first opera
"Das Gastspiel" ("The Guest Appearance") based on Frank
Wedekind's farce "Der Kammersänger" (1991) - the uncompromising
composer leaves the "grey areas of dismay [...] and allows room for laughter
without leaving out the false bottom." (H.W. Henze) Such ambiguity is also
communicated to the listener when, for example, mockery and grief, the sublime
and the grotesque, bright and dark, nonsense and profundity are brought close
together in Müller-Wieland's comic opera "Der Held der westlichen Welt"
("The Hero of the Western World") based on John Millington Synge
(2004/2005). The false bottom laid with many scores becomes a trapdoor to
the all-too-pondered Kafka exegetes in "Rotpeters Trinklied" for
high baritone and piano based on the story "Ein Bericht für eine Akademie"("A
Report for an Academy") (2004). In this musical homage to Kafka, the
composer's predilection for the grotesque - composed in gaudy colours - is
confronted with the disturbing and abysmal elements of the text: Kafka's ape
becomes a brother-in-suffering to Job, whose lament in the oratorio-like melodrama
"König der Nacht" ("King of the Night"), based on the
book "Job" (2002/03), in turn becomes a kind of drinking song: "The
loud accents of the winds symbolise the counter on which Job bangs his head."
(J.M.-W.) In such clair-obscur, of which there are many varieties
in Müller-Wieland's works, Elias Canetti's word on "mottled reality" seems
to echo, just as the avowal of the great models - the spiritually akin Schubert,
Janácek and Mahler - is unmistakeable. As an instrumentalist (piano, double
bass) and conductor, Müller-Wieland is frequently his own advocate as well,
and he emphasises, both audibly and visually, his conception of music and
a "corporeal language, a language created by the body." In addition, an ever-present
percussive element is attested through the proximity of many of his works
to the scenic - in a more or less vegetative blossoming and fading of the
musical shapes and in the incredible sonic sensuality of the scores of his
music as "corporeal language." This kind of view from the outside corresponds
to the view towards the inside with Müller-Wieland: "Composing means living
out the driving force and the life of the soul. Time and again, it always
has to do with escape attempts and declarations of love - with ties and separations."
Thus composing becomes for him an existential experience, the ever-new attempt
to say "I" in the medium of music, an opportunity and task to remain alive
in a human way. His testing ground meanwhile includes over 90 works, including
twelve stage works and four symphonies, orchestral and chamber works as well
as vocal music. This last-named category spans an oeuvre with the vox
humana of enormous variety in its choice of subject, highly inspired
in the musical realisation, ranging from the first song cycle "Yamin"
to poems of Peter Härtling (1985/87) to the "Liebeszene. Casa Verdi"
(for mezzo soprano and piano based on Schumann's Op. 42 [Chamisso] and "Last
Words of My Grandmother", 2010). In the lieder and songs to texts of
Michelangelo ("Tre Canzoni si Liriche di Michelangelo Buonarroti for
tenor and piano", 1989) and Frank Lanzendörfer ("Flanzendörfer-Wrackmente"
for baritone and string quartet, 1993), the music often painfully cuts itself
into the body of the poems, carrying the words away over abysses or remaining
silent around its imaginary centre. Such a lied-shadow falls upon a landscape
of works of an utterly singular character and a rhetorical power second to
none. This music is a balancing act, walking on that narrow edge that separates
the comic from the tragic, dream from reality, the inside from the outside
and, at the same time, allows them to merge into one another. To follow it
on this edge is to embark upon a fascinating adventure that begins with listening
and never reaches an end, as far as reflection and further thinking are concerned.
It resembles the adventure that Jan Müller-Wieland sees himself undertaking
when listening to his "desert island disc," the tone poem "Vers la flamme",
Op. 72 of Alexander Scriabin played by Vladimir Horowitz. His reason: "… for
the sweep and breath that lives here is like the flight of an eagle, one of
a dying breed, into our damned time - against the flame."