Magnus Lindberg: Chorale
the most reverent, sacred of parodies
Lindberg’s name is very new to me. For as much as I enjoyed discovering many of the Northern European composers in my Danish, Swedish, and Finnish series, he wasn’t one I came across (or was able to include) when covering the Finns.
He was born 27 June 1958 in Helsinki. He studied where of course you would expect a successful Finnish composer would have studied, at the Sibelius Institute, under Einojuhani Rautavaara and Paavo Heininen, but also on his travels in continental Europe with Donatoni, Ferneyhough, and Grisey.
His official career composing began in the very late 70s or early 80s and formed a new-music ensemble called Toimii (his equivalent of Boulez’s Intercontemporain, founded only a few years earlier?), as well as an “Ears Open Society,” which was an “informal grouping … including Lindberg and his contemporaries Eero Hämeenniemi, Jouni Kaipainen, Kaija Saariaho, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Herman Rechberger.” You may recognize a few of those names. You also may not.
He has won numerous awards and was composer in residence for the New York Philharmonic for the 2009-2010 season, Alan Gilbert’s first there as music director.
Background
Chorale dates from 2002. I am loath to use such a large quote, but I couldn’t do anyone any favors paraphrasing what the Hollywood Bowl provides as the background for the piece:
In 2001-2002 Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra of London set up a Lindberg project (“Related Rocks”), the aim of which was to place a number of Lindberg’s orchestral works in the context of his personal choice of influences. One of the concerts, in Leicester, England, featured Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, in the final Adagio of which Berg quotes the Bach chorale “Es ist genug.” For that concert, as an introduction to the Concerto, Lindberg wrote a Chorale that is a parody of the same Bach chorale. (In music, ‘parody’ does not mean ‘intentional mockery’ but refers to the practice, commonly used by Renaissance composers, of reworking an already established composition.)
One might say that this would be a perfect opportunity to program this alongside the Berg, and it crossed my mind, but I have other plans for that one in the more distant future, so we have it here. Lindberg sits alongside his teacher in works that have very strong Austro-German connections.
Speaking of which, have a listen to the original Bach chorale below. To be fair, it’s worth noting, as one YouTube commenter said: “The genius chromatic harmonization is entirely Bach's work, but at least part of the melody is by 17th century Johann Rudolph Ahle.”
For Bach, this is some wild harmony and chromatic coloration, which is purportedly part of the reason Berg found it so amenable, and with this still wafting through your years, we can continue to speak about Lindberg’s work.
I’m also sort of a sucker for the ‘parody’ referred to in the above quote: not a mockery, but a reuse, a jumping off point, the classical music/baroque version of ‘sampling’ another musician’s “beats” for your own use. More on that below.
Music
Most sources, including the Hollywood Bowl linked above, cite this work as having a duration of six minutes, but in Eschenbach’s reading, it comes in 50% longer, at nine minutes, and… I like that recording, so that’s the version I’m using.
In things like concert programming (as if I’m actually doing something serious here that would ever be actionable) (although I take it seriously), you get a bit of leeway by including something appealing alongside a potentially challenging or even upsetting, alienating work. When Jean-Efflam Bavouzet came to Taiwan, he had on his program Boulez’s first piano sonata, but it was set alongside works by Beethoven, Ravel, and Debussy. This gives the most challenging work on the program some helpful context.
Lindberg decorates or updates or embellishes the Bach chorale in a manner that calls to mind Boulez’s Eclat, or the pastiche-like work of some of Schnittke, without being quite so… harsh and insincere. But using Bach as a foundation lends this work a seriousness and even solemnity that makes it very appealing and gives relatable context to even the most modern, busy-sounding passages. Unlike something wild from his teachers Ferneyhough or Grisey, this approach gives us something relatable, identifiable, to latch onto, rather than being completely unmoored, and it’s this quality I find very interesting about the work: it means the work is at once intelligible and incongruous. And beautiful.
The Bach here isn’t hard to find. The music sounds like multiple layers of film or glass moving across one another: at times, the images overlap and create intricate, kaleidoscopic shapes. At other times, one layer becomes clearly visible and stands out in a moment of spotlighted glory.
This undulation and change of texture and color adds great interest to the music in a Boulezian way: it isn’t so much about seeing how the gears fit together and whir pristinely like in a Bach fugue; it’s more about the seemingly infinite color and texture that result from the complement/contrast of the modern treatment of Baroque inspiration.
Maybe that’s not really your thing, and to be honest, it isn’t always mine, but I find something very compelling about modern composers ‘going back to the beginning’ so to speak, pulling from (some of) the oldest, most revered music in the Western canon, as if to say that spirit is still here, and in some ways it is: the complexity and inspiration and artistic intent to create something meaningful and intentional, something that has a kind of integrity and vision. (I really can’t say that I personally feel that way about anything Ferneyhough has written, so it doesn’t apply universally.)
It doesn’t feel like plagiarism here, nor does it feel gimmicky like it so easily can with Schnittke, who throws in a few bars of Mozart or Handel or whoever as if to cover his bases or find protection under the aegis of The Great Masters.
Coda
Lindberg’s treatment is genuine, reverent, solemn, serious, and I really love that. He’s a guy whose works (many of which are smaller-scale single-movement things, not huge four-movement symphonies, although he does have some concertos to which I have not yet listened) I am eager to include throughout future programs, especially considering his rare breed as a ‘successful’ living composer (by whatever metrics that can be measured. The successful, not the living).
It also seems like a fitting lead-in to the German(ic)-inspired or at least Bruckner-as-jumping-off-point of his teacher Rautavaara’s third symphony, which appears next and finally on the program. Please enjoy, and thank you as always for reading.
Links
Next: Rautavaara Symphony no. 3