 
Heinrich Spängler
Helga Rabl-Stadler
G. Schwaighofer
Josef Hussek
Great success
The little match girl
DaPonte in Santa Fe
Masterclasses
Young Directors
Forging links
The Camerata
Compulsory
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Helmut Lachenmann
"THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL"
“… the wonderful world that may be concealed there“
“It was a bitterly cold New Year’s Eve. Snow was falling and darkness was already setting in as the poor little girl with no hat on her head and no shoes on her feet walked down the street.” These are the opening words of Hans Christian Anderson’s famous fairytale "The Little Match Girl". Helmut Lachenmann bases his first music theatre work on this story but Anderson’s poetical text only provides the framework for Lachenmann’s highly unconventional composition: it is neither a fairytale opera in the classical sense, like Humperdinck’s "Hansel and Gretel", nor does it simply transpose the original text into dialogue on a one-to-one basis.
Music with pictures
Music with pictures is the self-explanatory sub-title of the work. It refers not only to the scenes presented on stage but even more pertinently to those literally unheard of sound pictures which Lachenmann, drawing on the immense reserves of his sophisticated tonal language, succeeds in creating. Thus his version of the fairytale is presented primarily through extremely fine orchestral differentiation, which at times is descriptively real. The orchestra seems to physically feel the same bitter cold that Anderson’s little girl felt as she walked the snow-covered streets on New Year’s Eve, hoping in vain for someone to buy a matchstick from her. As the evening grows colder she lights a match, and then another match, and then another, in an attempt to keep herself warm, and each new matchstick is accompanied in Lachenmann’s music by increasingly ecstatic outbursts – a translation into contemporary language, as it were, of the flames of fire at the end of Wagner’s Die Walküre. Finally the girl sets all her remaining matches alight at once, and in one grand final vision she experiences all that childish joy and happiness of which the cold bitterness of life had deprived her. Her beloved grandma – in reality the Great Mother, Death – comes to the little girl and takes her home to Paradise.
Existential loneliness
Lachenmann weaves a number of episodes into the basic plot of Anderson’s fairytale, giving it a political and philosophical bias and relating it to our present-day world. On the one hand, he incorporates into his work recorded texts from the RAF activist Gudrun Ensslin who, unlike Anderson’s little girl, was not prepared to accept a role in society as an outsider. “Either you destroy yourself or you destroy others, you’re either dead or an egoist”, she wrote from her prison cell in Stammheim. Lachenmann had a personal connection: “I knew Gudrun Ensslin when I was a child. Like me, she came from a pastor’s family, full of ideals, ‘protestant’ in the radical sense; she joined the RAF (Red Army Faction) and set a large warehouse on fire. She died in 1977, murder or suicide we don’t know; at any rate the victim of an indifferent society that turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to everything.” On the other hand, the theme of existential loneliness – the feeling of being alone and abandoned which Anderson’s little girl experiences on that cold New Year’s Eve – is given a literary link through the profound philosophical tract of the universal genius Leonardo da Vinci entitled The Desire of Knowledge. In this work Leonardo evokes the power of the fire-spewing volcanoes and compares the forces of nature with man’s turbulent search for meaning. “He shows man”, says Lachenmann, “exposed to his own ignorance, solitary before a dark cave, alone with his shadowy fear of the darkness reigning within and at the same time longing to see with his own eyes the wonderful world that may be concealed there.”
Christian Wildhagen
About Helmut Lachenmann
Helmut Lachenmann, born in Stuttgart in 1935, studied music from 1955
to 1958 under Johann Nepomuk David (composition) and Jürgen Uhde (piano),
and from 1958 to 1960 under Luigi Nono, whom he met at vacation courses
in 1957. He lived in Munich from 1960 to 1973, practising as a freelance
pianist and composer. He won the city’s Culture Prize in 1965. By 1968
he had developed the notion of a Musique concrète instrumentale, which
explored tonal processes and extended the techniques of playing on largely
traditional musical instruments. His critical reflections on the concept
of structure and the cat- egories of the beautiful (”Beauty is the rejection
of the ordinary“) have had a major influence on the discussion about contemporary
music.
Lachenmann has been awarded many prizes, including the prestigious Ernst
von Siemens Prize in 1996.
The world premiere of his ”Music with Pictures“, based on Ander-son’s
The Little Match Girl, was performed in the Hamburg State Opera in 1997,
and was widely acclaimed.
Helmut Lachenmann
The Little Match Girl
A sound-and-picture production
Conductor Sylvain Cambreling
Pictures Hideaki Yamanobe
Film Harne Nonaka, Ichiro Kajiki
Voices Matthias Hermann
Soprano Eiko Morikawa
Soprano Rosemary Hardy
Piano Yukiko Sugawara
Piano Tomoko Hemmi
Sho player Mayumi Miyata
Speaker Helmut Lachenmann
SWR Symphony Orchestra
Baden-Baden and Freiburg
SWR Vocal Ensemble Stuttgart
Experimental Studio of the SWR
Heinrich Strobel Foundation
Sound André Richard
Felsenreitschule
30 August 2002, 7.30 p.m.
Tickets available from
the Festival Ticket Office
for € 120 and € 135.
Telephone: 0043 662 8045-500
Telefax: 0043 662 8045-555
E-mail: info@salzburgfestival.at