In this article, I outline ‘listening intertextually’ as a method of discerning a theme of liminal spaces that emerge from compositional process in a number of Beat Furrer's music theatre works: encounters between life and death, memory and reality, sleeping and waking. The presence of inbetweenness is, of course, indicated by the narratives of the three works I discuss – Begehren (2001), FAMA (2005) and Wüstenbuch (2010) – but I also consider this a theme that transcends individual works and can be read across them. Listening intertextually is therefore posed not as a means of discerning music-analytical detail about each of the operas but rather as a process that is itself represented in Furrer's music theatre works. To understand this I explore how Julia Kristeva's concept of ‘intertextuality’ can be understood through a reading of her engagement with the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. I employ intertextuality as a way of concurrently engaging with the multiple texts that make up the libretti of these operas, the way that themes and ideas are shared across them and the parallel pasts and present moments that result from this. I aim to show that the representation of the internal world in each of these pieces is central to their narratives and therefore to their signification: of a particular ambiguity that evades definition even as it represents a central component of human experience.
Between Life and Death
Liminalities underpin the concept of the Ba, which appears in one of the texts chosen by Furrer for the libretto of Wüstenbuch. The term ‘Ba’ is usually translated in EnglishFootnote 1 as ‘soul’ and can be understood as ‘signifying either the manifestation of the power of a being or a being whose power is manifest’, able to leave the body after death.Footnote 2 In the Ancient Egyptian philosophical text ‘The Dispute between a Man and his Ba’, both the man and the Ba consider aspects of life and death: whether the living should have control over when to choose to enter the afterlife if life on earth is unbearable, and how and when to endure difficulty in life in the knowledge of the future afterlife. While the man argues for death, the Ba does not so much make the case for life but rather for ambiguity, for patiently waiting for death in knowledge of an afterlife. This text is partly contained within a document now labelled as ‘Papyrus Berlin 3024’, which Furrer refers to as a source for the libretto of Wüstenbuch. Such ambiguities and liminalities, however, also underpin the characterisation of the spaces between life and death that are explored in the three operas discussed in this article, and one example of the way that these spaces are signalled is the combining of texts from multiple authors in their libretti. Indeed, this meeting of texts characterises most of Furrer's operas, music that he prefers to describe as ‘MusikTheater’.Footnote 3
In Wüstenbuch, a translation into German of the text of ‘Papyrus Berlin 3024’ by Jan Assmann is combined with extracts from the fragmented text by Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann, from the Spanish poet Antonio Machado and from the Roman poet Lucretius, with further text by the Austrian librettist Händl Klaus. FAMA and Begehren also draw on texts from Roman poets: both from Ovid, and Begehren additionally from Virgil. Similarly to Wüstenbuch, both also incorporate modernist texts, with FAMA using Arthur Schnitzler's writing and Begehren taking from novelist Cesare Pavese and poet Günter Eich. Evident throughout is the recurring combination of the mythological and the realist, the intrigue of the historical and the asceticism of modernist storytelling, the meeting of the present with the memory of things that are not within living memory. These combinations of (mostly) absent librettists and of texts from multiple sources that create new, hybrid texts hint at something of the aesthetics of Furrer's music: that his music articulates readings, positions or memories through a kaleidoscope that proposes many more possible examples of these things.
Of the three works under discussion Begehren [Desire] has the most recognisable story, a staging of the Orpheus myth. The opera centres on Orpheus’ journey out of the underworld; he is followed by Eurydice and must not turn to look at her or else she will be sent back to the realm of the dead. The synopsis of the opera describes the two characters searching for each other and themselves at the level of memory rather than in space and time. The most famous moment of the Orpheus myth, when Eurydice's fate is decided, occurs in the first scene of Begehren and, as Furrer says, ‘becomes almost frozen in several repetitions’.Footnote 4 This is represented in the libretto in the text assigned to Orpheus:
was war/was gewesen ist/wieder/Leere/durchquert/Es sei zu Ende
[what was/what has been/again/vacuum/crossed/it's over)].Footnote 5
The scenes of the opera explore ways of understanding this single moment, represented visually by the distance of the characters from each other on stage and musically by the relative spoken and sung content of the vocal parts.
This image serves as a parallel for the other works I describe. In FAMA, a young woman, Else, is forced into prostitution to pay off her father's debts. Again the opera is staged in what Furrer describes as a ‘single moment’. The echoes of the voices in Fama's [Rumour's] mythical house reverberate through the voices and ensemble within the piece, interrogating Else's visions of herself: ‘[w]hat occurs in a place for the exchange of feelings or sounds, as in Else's head or in Fama's house, can hardly even be summarised’.Footnote 6 Of this musicologist Daniel Ender writes that Ovid's account of Fama's house ‘does not distinguish where a sound comes from, does not ask what it is, accepts everything that comes to it, and allows it to reverberate within, transformed into a gentle resonance’.Footnote 7 This reverberation of sound is characterised in the subtitle sometimes given to the piece (but not used in the score), ‘the drama of listening’.Footnote 8
Martin Iddon considers the idea of listening – read through Jean-Luc Nancy and Gaston Bachelard – in the differences in the accounts of Fama's house of Ovid and Virgil. He writes, ‘listening is always a memory or an echo’,Footnote 9 a description which serves the listening encounters in Furrer's operatic worlds. Iddon's interpretation, like Furrer's, sides with Ovid, describing Fama as ‘an accurate witness of what she has heard’Footnote 10 and suggesting that ‘the aural turns inward before it turns outward’.Footnote 11 Similarly, Else in Furrer's FAMA considers images of herself within a mirror (Scene 6), within her own mind (Scene 7) and in the voices of others (Scene 8). In Scene 3, Else performs what Furrer describes as a ‘virtuoso speech aria’, an extended passage for the unsung voice; only part way through does she come to recognise herself in the sound of her voice as it returns to her from outside of her body.Footnote 12 This could perhaps be understood to represent musically an understanding of listening as a component of subjectivity. Iddon reflects Bachelard's understanding of this as ‘being in the resonant chamber of the self that is constituted in selfhood only by the recurring echo of the self itself’.Footnote 13 On several occasions in FAMA Else fails to recognise herself immediately in her own voice or appearance, only to come to a recognition of her reflection or echo.Footnote 14
Wüstenbuch presents a journey into the desert. In what might be thought of as 12 vignettes from this journey, Furrer says that the characters of his opera ‘encounter their own desert in the form of an absence of memory, the phantasmagoria of their own memories and ultimately, in the final scene, on a very elementary level: a reflection of a utopia of human existence, a just society’.Footnote 15 In each scene his source texts, in their original languages (except the Egyptian text), are framed or reflected upon by texts from Händl Klaus that function as streams of consciousness. In this way the ‘historical’ or remembered, and the search for this, is more clearly signalled than in Begehren or FAMA. In scenes where texts are juxtaposed, the spoken and sung texts are also articulated by structural elements (which follow the spoken texts) and instrumental sounds (which follow the sung elements of the libretto). These textual meetings open up spaces of memory, reflection and possibility.
The Berliner Festspiele programme book described the deserts of Wüstenbuch:
In Egyptian mythology, the desert is a metaphor for the foreign and at the same time for death. There, but also in the European tradition (cf. the ice deserts of Caspar David Friedrich or the civilization deserts of abandoned industrial plants), the desert functions as a projection surface for the fear of losing memories, of emptiness and the stranger.Footnote 16
The theoretical emptiness and resonance of the desert in Wüstenbuch might be the domain of the Ba. It is also an analogue of Fama's house, where resonance is the echo through which the internal self is re-encountered as other. In the desert there is only the other; nothing returns to the self. The liminality of each of these spaces is amplified by the meeting of the multiple texts in each libretto. This is expressed in one of Klaus's texts that appears in section XI:
unausweichlich alles inevitably everything
kam mir came to me
in die Quere in the way
das nicht mehr zu sehen that one no longer sees
und darum and therefore
schlagartig suddenly
unberechenbar became unpredictable
geworden und and… Footnote 17
Intertextuality in and as Music
These brief introductions to the operas and their liminal spaces also highlight the intertextualities hinted at in the introduction. The amalgamation of texts from multiple authors in each of these works suggests that intertextuality itself might offer an approach through which to analyse and understand Furrer's operas. However, these texts are not themselves the totality of the pieces and can be considered intertextually in light of the multiple additional ‘texts’ – music, vocality, staging – that intersect and overlap with them in the experience of the music.
The term ‘intertextuality’ is familiar but its origin is worth tracing to draw out its relevance to Furrer's music. It was first used in Julia Kristeva's 1966 essay ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’.Footnote 18 She proposes the phrase as one that advances the discussion of the meeting of different positions, ideologies, ideas and worldviews in written forms, and as one that might supersede the term ‘intersubjectivity’ (indicating meetings between the authors of texts rather than the texts themselves). She writes, ‘any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another’.Footnote 19 This quotation is itself intertextual, recalling Roland Barthes’ claim that ‘the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’,Footnote 20 but Kristeva is also reflecting her reading of Bakhtin, who writes of ‘language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a worldview’.Footnote 21 This is part of his conception of the dialogic nature of language as ‘a struggle among socio-linguistic points of view’,Footnote 22 a struggle that finds its meeting place within the text, characterised by Bakhtin as heteroglossic:
at any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles, and so forth, all given bodily form.Footnote 23
To listen to intertextuality as represented by such heteroglossia is therefore to listen to all of these elements concurrently. Such ‘languages’ can further be subject to ‘re-accentuation’,Footnote 24 which may involve a translation of medium (such as of poetic images into prosaic onesFootnote 25). Following Bakhtin and Barthes, Kristeva views this struggle as evident between multiple texts that are not limited to written and spoken language.
Of clear relevance to Furrer's work are the meeting of different ‘languages’ (which in this case includes music) and the interface between the past and the present within the text. Not all of the ‘languages’ present are in their original form: many have been translated into German. Nevertheless, the heteroglossia of these languages as individual worldviews remains, albeit refracted through the work of the translator; in the case of the ‘Dispute between a Man and his Ba’, the original language is not accessible. Yet the meeting of different viewpoints, as described in the quotation from Bakhtin, still takes place between the sources of the libretti, their meeting, in and as music, a ‘mosaic’ or a ‘tissue of quotations’.
Kristeva develops the concept of intertextuality to consider ‘a permutation of texts… in the space of a given text, several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another’.Footnote 26 To introduce the concept of desire into semiotics she proposes the terms ‘phenotext’ and ‘genotext’: phenotext explores the symbolic components of language; genotext denotes those aspects of signification that are beyond spoken and written language communication, that relate to the body and the internal world. A comparison can be made with Barthes’ conception of the ‘grain of the voice’: ‘the body in the voice as it sings’.Footnote 27 Instrumental music too can be understood in terms of a ‘grain’, signified not through language but ‘the certainty of the body’,Footnote 28 that is communicated through the act of listening.
In ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’, Kristeva had already developed the term ‘ambivalence’, which can be compared to the paradigmatic axis of meaning in semiotics. This is another reading from Bakhtin, and Kristeva claims that ‘the term “ambivalence” implies the insertion of history (society) into a text and of this text into history; for the writer, they are one and the same’,Footnote 29 and later that ‘everything written today unveils either the possibility or impossibility of reading and rewriting history’.Footnote 30 This again explains the relevance and suitability of these concepts for exploring the phenomena of intertextuality, re-accentuation, genotextual meaning and ambivalence in Furrer's work. Indeed, these concepts intersect each other as a musical intertextuality and as intertextuality within music; the kaleidoscope of perspectives on the scenes presented by Furrer is refracted through precisely this meeting point.
Listening Intertextually
These ideas of intertextuality can be explored in every scene of these works, but here I listen to a single scene from each opera to consider how they can be compared, contrasted and read through the lens of Kristevan theory. I have selected these scenes because each represent liminal spaces, moments between life and death, dreaming and waking, and memory and reality respectively. In each scene there is also a prominent tension between speech and singing, a feature of Furrer's compositional approach in his operatic works. In each example I consider the texts that are heard (or, in the case of FAMA, echoed or resonated), the roles of speech and singing and the use of music to articulate the meeting points and interstices of the operas’ worldviews. Staging could also form part of these considerations, but by focusing on listening I am giving space to the ‘drama of listening’, the genotextual component of Furrer's idea of MusikTheater.
Begehren, Scene IV
The opening sound and word of Begehren is ‘Schatten‘ [shadows]. The unvoiced vocal sound ‘sch’ draws an explosion of pointillistic sound from the ensemble, repeated, quick and fragmented gestures that create a canvas over which Orpheus speaks, describing the journey out of the underworld. Every instrumental sound in the piece, perhaps in the entire opera, comes from this sound. There is a direct link between this moment and the music in Scene IV, which begins with a similar explosion of activity: spoken and sung voices that mingle with the instrumental sound. In this scene, the chorus comprises all of the voices heard in the opera. The text is mostly spoken and moves in the libretto from German to Latin; in the music these languages are layered with vocalised sounds and with sudden sung syllables (for example, in bars 35–38).Footnote 31 These multiple contrasts in the chorus are further refracted in the instrumental parts, each part made up of micro-repetitions that echo the murmuring and whispering qualities of the choral parts. The principal characters’ negotiated journey between life and death thus becomes a musical push and pull between elements that emerge from the ensemble as quickly as they disappear. The tension between death and life is evidenced both in the contrast between speech and singing – elements that are juxtaposed throughout the opera – and in the role of the voice within this texture of constant movement, emerging from the ensemble sound only to be submerged again.
Moments of near-stasis interrupt this cacophony, as in bar 211 where ‘air’ sounds take over the voices and instruments. These moments punctuate the sonic activity: a dying away or moving away within the musical space, from which the mosaic of elements, led by the voices, re-emerges. Furrer describes the beginning of such a moment of re-emergence in a performance direction to the choir in bar 216: ‘always allow the sound to emerge from the breath-sound and then end as a breath-sound. always as dal niente. almost breathing “as a choir” [sic]’.Footnote 32 The space articulated in these moments is a space of memory: it is unclear whether the sound that emerges from this breath, as from the word ‘Schatten’, is representative of a real state beyond breathing or a memory of a life that is no longer accessible. This is articulated in the German text that opens the scene in the soprano and tenor voices:
so rief sie, entschwand Plötzlich so she cried out, suddenly disappearing
nach der anderen Seite dem Blick to the other side of the view
wie dünner Rauch wirbelnd in die Lüfte verfliegt like thin smoke swirling into the air
und sah ihn, der vergebens nach Schatten griff and saw him reaching for shadows in vain
und so viel noch sagen wollte and wanted still so much to say
nicht wieder not againFootnote 33
This memory space is the space between the world and the underworld. The aspects of repetition in this scene emphasise the way in which Eurydice lives and relives this singular moment; sung tones never truly break out from vocalised speech, the ‘empty’ space is filled with the sound of breath and wind; even the ensemble seems trapped in a cycle of recurrence between frenetic, repetitive activity and stasis, from which there is no eventual resolution.
FAMA, Scene 5
In Scene 5 of FAMA, Else sees a vision in which she imagines herself dead. At first she imagines it is dark or that night has fallen outside of the hotel. She asks ‘Wer wird weinen wenn ich tot bin?’ [Who will cry when I am dead?], then sees herself lying dead surrounded by candles. Looking out of the window, she sees a regatta taking place, which also has the characteristics of a burial at sea for her body. The scene begins with two flutes, who perform alternating whistle tones, dal niente, and who are given the instruction ‘bewegen sich langsam in der raum [sic]’ [move slowly about the room].Footnote 34 In Furrer's intended staging this creates an opening and closing of space and a distance between the listener and the sound, as well as the effect of fading in and out. These tones are heard as if from a distance and on to this sound other instruments are layered, performing quiet and fragmented interjections that coalesce into larger gestures, only to return to the high and quiet backdrop of the flute tones. The impression is of reaching for something that is on the edge both of sound and of memory, like waking from a dream. The quiet tones reach out, on the edge of audibility and stability, and as more instruments join the texture the music reaches for a polyphony that feels promised and is then abruptly terminated. As this texture brings aspects of the dream into view the music builds a repertoire of ideas, sounds and gestures. These are micro-repetitions, like those in Scene IV of Begehren; they are not regulated but rather create the sense of moving around a space in which one encounters and re-encounters these musical ideas.
Else's voice enters, first whispering, then speaking as these micro-repetitions emerge. From this musical tapestry emerges a duet between two bass clarinets that articulate interlocking patterns against the texture of the flutes and strings, who, when the bass clarinets are speaking, respond mostly with notes in a very high tessitura and with harmonics. These extremes of register and moments of repetition are cold, fragile and otherworldly. They invite description by some of the terms used by Orpheus to describe the underworld in the first scene of Begehren: ‘flüchtig… kalt… leer… starr’ [fleeting… cold… empty… rigid]. Thus one can imagine in these moments the emptiness of the space in which they resonate – an emptiness of human activity, which can only be glimpsed from the window – and perhaps the feeling that grounds Else's longing for the death that she has experienced in her vision. At the end of the scene, percussive sounds in the strings almost invoke – or can be interpreted as – footsteps, as she wakes from this vision. These sounds reflect the literal footsteps of the flautists whose sounds and movement opened the scene.
This scene perhaps has the most in common with an echo – or the most prominent qualities of an echo – of any in the opera. There are some resonances of the other scenes in the work where the music beyond the text is the focus, such as Scene 3, in which Else only recognises her spoken reflections as her own voice part way through speaking them. In this scene, she eventually recognises her vision as a dream, stating ‘Es hat sich doch gar nichts geändert und mir ist wohler’ [nothing has changed at all and I feel better].Footnote 35 The echoes present are not only the resonances of Fama's house (the hotel in which Else is staying) but within her memory. In this scene, one might hear an echo or a refraction of that from Begehren described above: the space between life and death and the echoes of the wind and breath in that space between the world and the underworld are also encountered here in Else's vision.
Wüstenbuch, Scenes VIII–IX
In Scene IX of Wüstenbuch we encounter the text from the ‘Dispute between a Man and his Ba’, although it is introduced by a passage from Händl Klaus’ libretto that describes the bodily experience of waking from a dream; this links the scene both to the previous scene of Wüstenbuch and to Scene V of FAMA. Scene VIII of Wüstenbuch begins with a regular, pulsed, breathy tone in one flute part, interjected by sforzando gestures from a second flute, gestures that eventually spread into the piano, percussion and strings. When the flute pulse ceases it is replaced by the voices; they sing a series of tones together, dying away to leave only the ensemble gestures, again a series of short repetitions that fit together irregularly. The voices return, their harmonies and regular rhythm a direct contrast to the ensemble gestures and a moment of unity. This wholeness is the act of the body waking, the moment when memory of the dream is lost. Scene IX begins in the desert, the characters confronting the loss of memory and the concept of time, leaving only the contemplation of the possibility of death and what might lie beyond it.
The Egyptian text is heard, spoken clearly and foregrounded more than any other part of the work's text, the contrast between the vocal ensemble tones and the spoken text heightening the moment. If the end of Scene VIII was a waking from a dream to contemplate death, this is the recurring contemplation of death in sound that was always just below the surface; the liminal space has become a musical space. Again, a series of sounds that are high, fragile and distant open the instrumental music, emanating first from bowed percussion. The instrumental language of Scene VIII is revisited as an echo, the instrumental gestures much quieter and here connected not through pulses but quietly sustained moments. The repetition of the words ‘Der Tod steht heute vor mir‘ [death stands before me today] is reflected in the repetition of these ensemble gestures, the rhythm or periodicity of the scene moving in slow cycles between spoken text and instrumental gesture. Rather than exact repetitions these are also breaths, shifting between activity and imperfect stasis, creating the impression of a moment to which one returns and will return again. In all three of these scenes the relationship of sound, voice, text and form demonstrates how these ideas can meet in an extended musical moment. The operas are that moment, yet they also propose that there are many more such moments that have passed or are yet to be imagined and experienced. In listening, the audience experiences the meeting of the texts that form the libretti, their musical expression and the ideas of the past and the present, memory and experience, that are refracted through them. Life and death become a concurrent past, present and future, at once known and unknown. As Eurydice says in Scene IX of Begehren:
nie erreichbar/was ersehnt/nicht hier/nirgendwo/deine Einsamkeit/verdoppelt die meine
[never attainable/what's longed for/not here/nowhere/your isolation/doubles mine]Footnote 36
The imperfect unions that mark the moments of stasis in Scene IX of Wüstenbuch return in Scene XI; it begins with close pitch relationships between the sung voices and instruments that weave above and below each other. These are followed by a chorus mixing spoken, sung and whispered tones, a collage of sound reminiscent of the cacophony of voices heard in the space between the world and the underworld in Scene IV of Begehren. Repeated short rising and falling gestures create textures of micro-repetitions that are shattered by punctuating moments from the voices and the ensemble. The repetitive element is more pronounced than in the two scenes discussed earlier and is orchestrated for the ensemble as a whole rather than just within individual parts. The musical texture of voices and instruments can be heard as a development of similar textures in both Begehren and FAMA, and this echo of the compositional approach of the previous works is evident throughout the music of Scene IX. Where the space between the world and the underworld was articulated in Wüstenbuch as an imaginary, or otherworldly, space, it has now made its way into the world. No longer an encounter with an echo or resonance, the voices of the opera can now announce ‘Der Tod steht heute vor mir‘.
Some Conclusions: Listening to Liminal Spaces
Life and death, negotiated in the dispute of the man with his Ba, are here encountered as a musical space that has been articulated by Furrer across these three works. The repetitive and heterophonic use of small and fragmented figures in the ensemble writing forms part of an overall structure of blurred repetition and heterophony: meso-structures within macrostructures that create an overall stasis, cycling between different spheres and ideas of activity but never developing and moving beyond them. Sung moments punctuate these textures, guiding the instruments, who take these as starting points for trajectories through different facets of musical sound, and speech guides the overall structure of the operas. This music can be experienced as a kind of pointillism that is itself an articulation of a single point; in Wüstenbuch, this can also be heard as articulating a point that was encountered from different directions in the preceding two operas.
While life and death, their perception and the spaces they occupy are depicted explicitly in these three scenes, the liminality of these spaces is also established compositionally in Furrer's work. I have described this as a listening experience in order to demonstrate that this is neither a case of the articulation of the narrative of any one of these operas, nor a setting of the texts chosen from the multiple authors whom Furrer takes as his librettists, but rather the establishment of a musical space in which the ideas of life and death reverberate as genotextual meaning. The relationship between speech and singing is just one facet of this relationship: in each scene Furrer consistently connects sung and voiced tones to instrumental sound, and in each opera he connects spoken and unvoiced sounds to the structural elements that signify changes of pace, scene and viewpoint.
This, then, relates back to the Ba, a concept that has been defined and is also undefinable, a genotextual meaning. There are other genotextual meanings that are comparable across the operas: the distance of memory and the tension involved in bringing it to expression, a process that is repeatedly shown to straddle what is in and beyond the world. The intertextuality of the operas is therefore not only to do with the textual sources but with the interconnectedness of the compositional elements and is part of the texture of experience that Furrer is able to represent on stage: resonance of and within the self. In this way intertextuality is shown to be a productive and creative compositional strategy that achieves more than the sum of its parts: each of these operas is, to use Bakhtin's term, a re-accentuation of meaning from historical texts. This is linked to the change of medium from prose and poetry to opera and is also present in their remaking, not as narratives of the past or of events that have already passed, but rather as present moments that are made and remade, lived and relived. This is a process of ambivalence, and Furrer inserts each of these moments into a worldview (after Bakhtin) that belongs to his present moment.
I am listening for a kaleidoscope of references and hearing the panoply of Furrer's work as a further instance of this phantasmagoria. This in turn has to do with Furrer's rethinking of what MusikTheater is and what it represents: the ‘drama of listening’. The internal conflict between inside/outside, known/unknown, life/death, familiar/strange is staged by Furrer across these three operas. His compositional style offers not linear narratives but concurrent multiple perspectives and tableaux that call one another and themselves into question, even as they advance their own arguments and perspectives. In such music there are no conclusions, only the proposition of spaces beyond even those that are unfolding in the moment.
