Departing this world
A reminiscence of Clytus Gottwald by Frieder Bernius
What a work! What a life! Never willing to compromise; self-critical rather than ambitious; but always with the requisite self-confidence.
Where did this come from? Unlike his generation and that of my parents, we did not have to live through a collapse in civilization around 1945. Could it have been this rupture that made Clytus Gottwald incapable of compromise, convinced him of the “progress in musical material”, which sometimes made him scoff at neo-tonal compositions at the beginning of the 1980s and realize that his true place did not lie with the “creatives” but rather with their “facilitators”? This was the incisive analysis offered by Thomas Kabisch at the funeral service on January 30th. And it echoes the sympathetic opinion of Manfred Schreier in the Festschrift for Gottwald’s 80th birthday (Carus 24.049) that he rigorously opposed the regurgitation of previous styles (“What for?”).
But are facilitators just some kind of subordinate “helpers”? Certainly, Clytus Gottwald will not be remembered in this way. Especially when his compositional material aims to transcend boundaries in ways previously thought impossible, it is inevitable that questions must be asked of those who produced it, “questions destined to be solved each time in an unexpected way,” as Pierre Boulez put it in the birthday Festschrift. We can never forget how Gottwald himself once talked with amusement about his function as the serving “choirmaster” in collaboration with Boulez, one of his best friends. Boulez and Ligeti departed this world before him, he wrote in the preface to one of his arrangements. Now he has caught up with them.
Alma und Gustav Mahler. Transcriptions for choir a cappella
Clytus Gottwald
SWR Vocalensemble Stuttgart,
Marcus Creed
Carus 83.370
What experiences must Gottwald have made as an assistant to Marcel Couraud and his Paris ensemble in the 1950s, amidst the still-smoldering ruins of the “arch-enemy”? Doubtless, he will have first encountered the treatment of unaccompanied voices as an equal and effective counterpart to instrumental performance – as in Messiaen’s Cinq rechants, written for Couraud’s ensemble in the late 1940s. This must have formed the nucleus of his vision of expanding the human voice’s limitations beyond traditional notions of what is “singable” – a goal he shared with his “Schola Cantorum” from the 1960s together with the leading composers of that time such as Lachenmann, Boulez, Schnebel, Holliger, and Ligeti. What led him to later concentrate on arranging instrumental works and songs (with piano) for vocal ensembles? In an article published after the turn of the century in the annual program of the SWR Vokalensemble, he pleads for the continued development of choral music. In particular, he stresses that “the technological possibilities of the choir as an instrument were exhausted in the 1960s” and demands “a decisive step into the future”, one that would “transform the innovations of that time into something new.” Further: “One of the most important innovations was certainly that of diversification, i.e. the notion of no longer treating the choir as an undifferentiated mass, but rather engendering a sense of chamber music performance … The collective choral sound will then be constituted from the liberated performance of each singer rather the suppression of the individual …” Was this the Big Bang-moment for his arranging?
During this time, he must have become fascinated by György Ligeti’s microtonality. And since Ligeti’s Requiem, composed between 1963 and 1966, lacks the Communio (the Lux aeterna) which normally belongs to the Missa pro defunctis, Gottwald asked him to set this text for 16 voices a cappella. This inaugurated the beginning of a new wave of compositions written specifically for this size of ensemble. For Gottwald, the 16-voice setting was a necessary extension of Messiaen’s 12 voices, in the belief that it would enable him to blur the line between soloistic capabilities and choral accomplishment. Ligeti’s Requiem, in contrast to his Aventures of the same time, is limited compositionally to purely vocal expression (Peter Rummenhöller once called it “neo-Romantic”) with whole- and half-tone clusters. A constraint? On the one hand, yes; but on the other, this approach demanded an accuracy of intonation that previously could only be achieved instrumentally. So hats off to the first recording of this work by Schola, released by WERGO just a few years after the premiere.
This work, and thus the example of Gottwald and his Schola, have accompanied me throughout my life. I was personally acquainted with many of its members; in particular, I had close contact with the deepest bass of the Schola, my voice teacher, August Meßthaler, who taught me a vocal technique that I still draw on today. For me, Lux aeterna came like a bolt from the blue after my experience with Baroque music and training as a singer. I first tackled the score four years after its premiere, although I only truly mastered it when making my own recording in the late 1990s. For this work taught me how to achieve an a cappella performance (also of other compositions) that is in no way inferior to an instrumental interpretation. Let’s not forget that as late as the 1920s, Schoenberg believed it necessary to add a colla parte wind accompaniment to his a cappella Friede auf Erden (Peace on Earth), because for him it was simply unimaginable that singers could perform without “backing” instruments, just as peace was impossible without “the backing of arms”, as he wrote shortly after the end of the First World War. Any good performance requires a dynamic balancing of open and closed vowels (a “lux” will always sound quieter than an “aeterna”) as well as vocal balance achieved through good singing technique (so-called singing “in the mask”) in order to precisely realize the required half-tone intonation. How often did I fail in bars 5 and 6, or 42 and 43?
Gottwald himself once wrote in a booklet: “In 1978, while Boulez was rehearsing Ravel’s orchestral song Soupir, the possibility of a choral transcription occurred to me in a flash, which I soon was able to realize. This was easier for me because 13 years earlier, during a performance of Ligeti’s Lux aeterna, I had become acquainted with a completely new choral technique, namely that of composing in tonal planes.” The transcription of Ravel’s orchestral song for the 16 voices of the Schola, and shortly thereafter Mahler’s Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, ushered in a new chapter in Gottwald’s work, followed by over 120 arrangements, which have greatly enriched the choral repertoire and were first published by Universal Edition in Vienna, and later by Carus. His brilliant command of polyphonic vocal writing, certainly approaching that of the above-mentioned “creatives”, allows every singer to achieve the “liberated performance” hoped for by Gottwald.
Frieder Bernius is in great demand worldwide as a conductor, seeking a sound which is both authentic and at the same time distinctive and personal – whether in the vocal works of Bach, Homilius, or Ligeti. He has conducted the complete recording of the sacred vocal music of Mendelssohn and many other recordings, and is also editor of music editions published by Carus
Im Abendrot. Adagietto from the 5th Symphony. Vocal transcription by Clytus Gottwald
Ligeti. Requiem (Bernius)
Clytus Gottwald. Choral arrangements
Gottwald/Mahler: Alma and Gustav Mahler. Transciptions for choir a cappella
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