Performance as Composition

For more than two decades the German composer Heiner Goebbels has written music for theatre, ballet, opera, radio, TV, and concert hall as well as tape compositions and sound installations. He has created music for many theatre productions, such as Danton's Death, directed by Ruth Berghaus, and Richard III, directed by Claus Peyman. In recent years New York audiences have been introduced to his work with performances of Hashirigaki at the BAM Next Wave Festival and Eislermaterial and Black on White with the Ensemble Modern at the Lincoln Center Festival. Goebbels had worked frequently with the texts of Heiner Müller, including The Liberation of Prometheus, Shadow/Landscape with Argonauts, Wolokolamsk Highway, and The Man in the Elevator, seen in New York at The Kitchen within days of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It featured Müller himself reading his text, accompanied by the musicians Don Cherry, Arto Lindsay, George Lewis, and Ned Rothenberg. Other authors whose writings have been used in musical settings are Gertrude Stein, Poe, Thoreau, Robbe-Grillet, and Kierkegaard. Paul Auster's In the Country of Lost Things was featured in Surrogate Cities. Heiner Goebbels' music is performed frequently in festivals on several continents (www.heinergoebbels.com). In 2003, Sir Simon Rattle conducted his orchestra piece, From a Diary, in its Berlin Philharmonic premiere. This interview was conducted in New York, March 19, 2003.

* * *

Welcome to the United States! I extend the greeting in the fashion that Frank Zappa does in his piece with the Ensemble Modern, but with the present moment in mind. I wanted to ask the art-in-relation-to-politics question last, and I feel I have to ask it at the outset because the historical occasion demands it. So, I would like you to consider the problem that one's art can never entirely control the context of its performance. The New York performance of your piece Hashirigaki happens to coincide with the initiation of the bombing campaign in Iraq. If nothing else, this is what the audience brings to the theatre; its thought and affect is weighed down by this occasion, whether acknowledged or not.

I doubt that an artist has much of an influence on the political relevance of his artistic work. If art is too much on purpose, if its destination is too obvious, it loses certain qualities as artwork. As Heiner Müller points out: "It is like harnessing a horse to a car. The car doesn't run well and the horse doesn't survive it either." So I think it's good that the artist does not completely control the political context of a performance. Especially if you are a political artist and you want the work to be open to the world, to whatever occurs out there, I think one day or another you will face such a coincidence. It is much better than to pretend that your work is imminently actualized. I'm very skeptical about direct political relation between artistic statement and the message to the audience. Once you're working in an open-minded way, I trust that sooner or later the work will come to breathe in the situation around it. I'm not sure how this will come to be with Hashirigaki, which is rather colorful and playful and perhaps light, except to say that the piece already stands in a strong controversial position toward my other work, which is rather dark and concrete.

I just finished an opera in Geneva, called Landscape with Distant Relatives, where I also used texts by Gertrude Stein, from Wars I Have Seen, which she wrote during the Second World War in the south of France. Texts she wrote sixty or seventy years ago nowadays seem as if they were written yesterday. It's much better this way: to discover, almost by an accident, the political importance in the material than to pretend there is such...