In Translation: Two Interviews with Chaya Czernowin
A pair of interviews given in Munich in anticipation of the 2000 premiere of Czernowin’s first opera Pnima… ins innere. Translated from the German.
“This Scream Had To Be Released”
Composing the Unfathomable: A Conversation with Chaya Czernowin
Interview with Susanne Stähr for the program book of the 2000 Munich Biennale
SS: Ms. Czernowin, do you actually like going to the opera?
CC: Without hesitating I would go so far as to say I hate opera.
SS: Why so? What don’t you like?
CC: It has to do with the mixing of different forms of art and media. The pure intrinsic value of the individual arts -- the music, the drama, the scene, the pictures -- are diminished and the whole becomes frequently diluted. But there are a few exceptions: operas that have such a strong emotional pull that you can hardly escape the effect. Richard Wagner's Tristan is worth mentioning, but above all Wozzeck. Berg's Wozzeck was my first encounter with music theater in any form. The Frankfurt Opera, conducted by Michael Gielen, performed the piece in Israel. I was around twenty then. In the middle of the performance, during the pause, I suddenly had to cry: the experience was so powerful.
SS: Now, as a composer, you are turning to the genre for the first time...
CC: The fact that I have now written a piece for music theater myself is actually the result of earlier work. A few years ago I composed a vocal work for Ute Wassermann called "Shu Hai Practices Javelin,” which I like to call a virtual opera. It’s based on nine poems by the Israeli author Zohar Eitan that unite different voices, voices that comment on, counteract and complement each other to form a network of external meaning and internal psychology, text and subtext. I took this construction and gave it a musical counterpart. Ute's voice was recorded on tape several times beforehand and arranged in simultaneity, so that different casts could emerge that reflected the most diverse facets of Ute's voice. The sound echoed from all corners of the room: sometimes as a solo voice, sometimes as a whole Ute-Choir, then again as a counterpoint of two Ute-Sounds that had separated in character. And from these many pluralisms, new units were formed, eventually culminating in a hyper-unity. With Pnima I continued, refined and expanded this notion that the individual could become a multiplicity and that this multiplicity could ultimately lead to another unity. The difference here is that three units -- the old man, the child, and the orchestra -- form the individual basis, and the scenery is no longer virtual.
SS: Nevertheless, the work seems rich in contradictions. The starting point of the plot is David Grossman's novel See Under: Love, more precisely, the first part of it entitled "Momik" -- but the play is not a Literature-Opera. It is a composition for the stage, but without a libretto.
CC: Yes, it won't be easy for the director, and Claus Guth knows it -- but luckily he sees it as a challenge. There is a basic concept which defines the dramatic line and serves as a guiding principle. We are not dealing with a traditional division into arias, ensembles or recitatives, but with three acts that simultaneously mark a large, flowing curve. The setting could be called an inward journey, a processual psychological development that follows the characters' attempt to enter into a dialogue. In the first part, the two characters, the old man and the little boy, are introduced, they are simply there. However, the scene is latently shaped by an invisible force that I try to mirror in static, somehow frozen orchestral surfaces, namely the intuition of an unimaginable catastrophe: be it memory or vague prior knowledge. In the second part, the perspective moves closer to the characters, there is an exchange between the protagonists. The "innocent" music of the child experiences a rupture, the orchestral surfaces are now examined in detail from close up, it becomes obvious that the structures have an inner movement. Finally, the third part only shows the psychological effect of the previous one on the child: in this finale, all the musical components express the boy's condition, they fuse into a single, large voice that gradually concentrates on the orchestra. It seems to speak, to communicate something that cannot be said in words.
SS: The drama you are portraying is the aftermath of a traumatic experience, specifically: the Holocaust. It's about the impossibility of coming to terms with the horror, of articulating it and the catastrophic effects that this impossibility has on the generation that follows. Is it even possible to do justice to such a topic in an aesthetic way -- or wouldn't that be something for a sociological or psychological thesis?
CC: You can never and nowhere really do justice to this process. But perhaps artistic engagement can create an experience so physical and immediate that it penetrates and melts the layer of ice that has formed around the subject. I think the whole history of the arts can be summed up as an attempt to manifest something intangible. As a trigger for the creative process, I see two essential impulses: On the one hand, we are concerned with the power and beauty of life, friends, lust, light. On the other hand, there is the opposite impulse: the dark, the despair, the sadness, the fear of death. So both are very elementary sensations. It doesn't matter which side you come from -- I myself usually start with the latter: You always end up at one and the same point, namely the question of why, of the mystery of life and death. And that is a question that cannot be solved in a theoretical treatise, but rather in touching something untouchable, in approaching it. It's the paradox of art: it captures you with hidden messages that you can't really decode and which are precisely why you can't let go. It expresses a powerful experience and yet cannot be objectified or abstracted. To put it bluntly: I just want to compose something that I don’t understand, something that is unknowable. If I understand everything, the mystery is dead, and with it the piece.
SS: Adorno once said that poetry was no longer possible after Auschwitz. How do you feel about this?
CC: Ambivalent. Perhaps one can no longer write poetry for the sake of expression [Gesichts]. One cannot simply “imagine away" the horror, for example by sentimentally evoking a distant past that was not yet tainted by catastrophe. But one can certainly try to find another form, another expression. This expression has nothing to do with the usual sublimation inherent in poetry. We must not suppress that Auschwitz occurred — and even more so that genocides continue to occur.
SS: In the 1940s, Arnold Schoenberg provided direct evidence on the contrary to Adorno with his monodrama "A Survivor from Warsaw." How do you relate to Schoenberg?
CC: I don’t at all, I want to do something completely different. By having the narrator recount an experience and the orchestra translate that experience into music, Schoenberg composed a description of horror in "Survivor" -- in strong, emotional colors. Pnima never tries to describe, but wants to offer an immediate experience, wants to touch. The music does not arouse the well-known feelings and associations on this subject, it appeals instead to a subconscious primal reflex, targeting an emotional layer that does not yet have a name because it is so elementary and precedes any process of concretization.
I heard the first rehearsals this week: the sound world was just how I wanted it, and yet I was surprised by the result: it seemed to me like a demonstration of inner strength and elemental force that I didn’t even know I had. I actually think of myself as moderated, but this scream had to be released [mußte wohl nach außen], it wouldn’t tolerate moderation.
SS: The little boy's experience, his encounter with trauma: do you also see a bit of your life in it?
CC: We are dealing with a child raised in a sheltered environment. Perhaps too sheltered, for he senses that the overprotection being offered is a reaction to a catastrophe that befell his parents. But the child cannot know what kind of catastrophe it was, since it is not talked about. So the boy tries to bridge the gap for himself, to make it understandable. [This final word is given as lebbar in the German, an obvious typo. I have opted to translate this as Lesbar, “to comprehend.”]
I'm sure David Grossman mirrored his own childhood in the boy's situation. And I also recognize myself in it, after all I belong to the same generation. In Israel we are called “Memorial Candles" or the Second Generation of the Holocaust. Pnima is dedicated to my parents. They both came from Poland. My father was fourteen when he found himself alone in the world; before then he had a large family. My mother had to flee too, traveling alone with her brother. Her father joined the Russian army, her mother died.
SS: Your work is being premiered in Germany: what feelings does that evoke in you?
CC: Pnima could be played anywhere. It isn’t specifically about the Holocaust, but much more abstractly about trauma in general. It’s a topic that is valid not only for a certain group of people of a national, cultural or religious nature, but for all people.
I am convinced that for most of us from the Second Generation of the Holocaust, the individual has become more important than the collective. We had to learn to pay attention to phenomena and individuals and not to categories and collective determinations. Paradoxically, however, I believe that we have only been able to gain this freedom because we now have our own country, which gives us a privileged, secure position.
I myself have been living abroad for many years, again and again in Germany, where I was able to make close personal and professional contacts, but mainly in America. I don't feel bound by any national criteria; I am just a person of the world.
SS: Let's talk about the musical means you use in Pnima: How would you describe your sonic language?
CC: Pnima is a process of self-discovery and self-exploration. The result seems spontaneous, with an almost improvisational quality. The sound world is rough, seemingly unrefined. And yet the scores consist of many filigree details, colors and weights, which I use very consciously. I want to leave an organism to itself, one which is always moving, varying, emerging — free from the traditional laws of art: my music is a quest. That's why my works have their own consistency, almost like in a dream when you don't know exactly why or how something develops. The focus is on the metrical work: the units of time are divided into sub-units, reconnected, form overarching groups — and one plus one is by no means always just two. The sound fabric is subject to constant changes, there are new instruments and meta-instruments. The whole orchestra can sound like a solo, a single voice can sound like a choir. A permanent polyphony emerges, but the score looks as if someone has gone over it with an eraser and left a trace of themselves [habe seine Spuren hinterlassen]…
SS: You have included parts for vocal soloists, but without a text. What does your treatment of the vocal parts look like?
CC: Each role, that is, the voices of the old man and the child, is divided into two singing parts that are intertwined and cannot be separated: they are one. The treatment of the two male voices could be compared to one of those fantastically slow tracking shots in Tarkovsky's films. I want to penetrate the voices with a microscope, to illustrate their nature, their inner being. So the soloists sing long stretched lines in which the transitions between the vowels and consonants are made very clear. Sometimes there are seemingly uncontrolled moments in the voice-leading, like the memory of a cry under a microscope. But these small outbursts and outbreaks [Ausbrüche und Abbrüche] are of course precisely marked in the score. Because you have to be incredibly accurate to create a result that feels spontaneous and emotional. Emotion in music only arises through the precision of the means.
I deal with the female voices in a completely different way: they are fast, fluid and flexible.
SS: Finally, the live electronics play an important role: What is their dramaturgical function?
CC: The electronics create spatial effects: the sound comes from all sides, giving the listener the impression of sitting inside a dome. But through the microscopic treatment of the sounds, the attendees [Behandlung] have not only an insight into the psychogram of the protagonists, into the topography of the trauma, no, more than that: they wander within the sound organism, become a part of it, they reach its innermost being.
Conversation with Detlef Brandenburg for Die Deutsche Bühne
Published May, 2000
DB: Ms. Czernowin, when I read the press release of Pnima... ins innere I was, especially as a German, aware of the subject first: as a Jewish composer born in Israel, you are dealing with the Holocaust. What is your personal connection to this topic?
CC: My parents are both from Poland and the story of both of their families ended in the Holocaust. My father stayed behind alone at the age of 14, he had a very large family before. And my mother stayed alone with her brother, as her father was in the Russian army. So the Holocaust has also become part of my story. I grew up in a wonderful home -- my parents love life very much, my mother has an incredible power of overcoming. Our house was full of sun, I was sheltered -- but I was very sensitive as a child. And I always had this suspicion that there was still something really terrible that I wasn’t allowed to touch. This sensitivity was of course influenced by my situation at the time, but I think that it was also something universal. Because as human beings we are set up in such a way that we always leave the fragility of our being in the unconscious. So it remains something untouchable. I see my practice as an attempt to make this untouchability tactile again. But it took a long time before I felt and finally understood the fragility of the ideal world around me. And that applies to my entire generation: many people of my generation in Israel have gradually had to understand that much of what has shaped them is nourished by this root. It was a taboo subject -- but the psychologists of my generation have started to address it, and movies and books about the kids who are the "second generation" are coming out. In this context, a new name has been coined for these children: "Candles of Remembrance" -- because it is important for our parents that we, as witnesses, pass on their experiences. Of course, I cannot give a genuine testimony of anything that I myself have not experienced. But the need for genuine testimony, especially when one is attempting to express what is actually an incommunicable experience, is very clear to me. In my compositional work, this necessity takes the form of a resistance to all sentimentality, nostalgia, sublimation -- a rejection of all that makes the testimony beautiful and smooth.
DB: Your opera will be premiered in Munich, once the "capital of the movement," as it was called at the time. You are very close to the historical roots of Nazism. Does that have any significance?
CC: Well, I’m ambivalent. I think, for better or for worse, people are always people. This is what David Grossman shows in his novel See Under: Love, the first chapter of which forms the basis of my opera. Grossmann also shows a kind of mixture -- somewhere in this novel the Jew suddenly discovers that he too has a part of Nazism in him! It's just not that clear.
DB: So it's not just about the historical event for you, but also about the archetypal dimension that the Holocaust reveals?
CC: Exactly, that's an important aspect! There is the imprint my parents gave me. But there is also this general awareness that you can learn from such a historical catastrophe: that you should never look at people as a collective. There are these two axes: the historical axis, but also the one that leads into the future.
DB: Did current forms of German Neo-Nazism play a role for you?
CC: That played a role, yes. But -- I live in America. And so what is happening there between the black and white population also played a role; or -- I lived in Japan for a long time: what is happening there between Japanese and Koreans, what is happening now in Israel between Israelis and Ethiopians... I don't want to say that all this is Nazism, of course not! But I think these are all different faces of the same phenomenon: people hate other people because of different parentage. And I can't accept that, this collective hatred of "the others," "the strangers"...
DB: You mentioned Grossmann's novel, which is about a child's encounter with his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor. But Pnima isn't actually a “Literature-Opera.”
CC: No, exactly. The novel was just a starting point, which I divided into three situations: In the first situation the child and the old man meet. In the second situation they try to establish communication; and in the third the child translates what he understood from the grandfather into his own conception of the Holocaust. I see these situations as metaphorical stages: I am trying to reflect the process of dealing with a catastrophe. First there is defense, resistance, anger, disbelief, non-acceptance. This materializes in the old man in the first scene. The second scene is the establishment of communication, it is the scene of the child: here fragility, pain, and openness emerge. And the third part is reserved for the orchestra, which has a specific function. In the first two parts it plays very little, it is static, it represents the ominous, it is always in the distance [verfremdet] -- it is this intangible, strong presence that we can't really touch. But in the third part, the orchestra becomes a universal, archetypal voice: the voice of a survivalist that shares the knowledge of the catastrophe, one that knows things have to go on but that people remain people, the danger remains, that's the way the world is.
DB: They tell it without a libretto, without words...
CC: Yes exactly, that's why it's hard for me to talk about it. If I tried to describe my opera now, a "narrative" would emerge. But I hope that listeners come out of a performance without knowing “what that was." It should remain in this intangible state: impress itself in the depths, so to speak. [sozusagen in der Tiefe wirken]
DB: Then may I still try to describe your music and you correct me? You can't just hear your music as "beautiful" -- there isn't the self-sufficiency of the beautiful sound or the melody simply trying to please; and there is also no presence of a familiar form, which one accepts unquestioningly because one has long since become accustomed to it. You build your works out of what appear to be very spontaneous "gestures", which, although they are not based on traditional forms, appear consistent in their own right and thus also have a structure-forming effect. That's why your music feels spontaneous, but not accidental -- one instinctively seeks meaning in these "gestures." Your music "acts," it "says" something, but wordlessly...
CC: Yes -- I always hope that my music has an organic quality. Everything organic has to express itself in its own form, an individual form that can change at any time, spontaneously and nevertheless according to its own laws. It's really my obsession how to get music away from conventional expectations, from safety. And yet it must not work haphazardly. How can I get away from expectations without the listener losing interest, simply accepting: "Yes, that makes sense, there is a meaning!" But I think that the later this meaning comes, the later it appears to the listener -- the better the piece!
DB: Pnima is music theater -- what's left for the director to do?
CC: I believe that it is very important that the visuals also set their own strength against the music. Otherwise the totality of the work of art has lost its meaning. Alone the three stages, the situations, have a dramatic quality. Also the three characters: the old man, the boy, the orchestra -- each has their own sound world, so you immediately "see" something when you hear them. There are already beginnings of a staging in the music. The director Claus Guth and the stage designer Christian Schmidt will work from a clear dramatic scenario. In addition, they will work a lot with video projections, so that already two levels of reality can be seen.
DB: What role do the live electronics play?
CC: The total sound is recorded via microphones, electronically amplified and then, so to speak, distributed in the room. The orchestra, as a representative of the ominous, for example, has to take a different place in the room than the man or the child: It comes from all directions, even from above, so that a "sound dome" is created. At first the man and the boy are strictly separated, but these positions change as the piece progresses...
DB: ... which also has a dramatic aspect, that of a ‘sound-staging,’ so to speak.
CC: Yes, ‘sound-staging’ is a nice term for what I want to achieve. Because there is a "story" in the sound and in the sounding space -- it's a kind of narrative process.
DB: We are used to hearing an orchestra as a variety of different instruments. But you often describe the orchestra as a single large instrument that, so to speak, differentiates itself. And vice versa, the voices of the man and the boy are not single, but doubly cast.
CC: Yes, these paradigms are very important to me. My entire philosophy of sound is based on this, it has a very close connection to this feeling of self and other: I can't just be one voice, there are always several voices in the self. And vice versa, of course, the orchestra has de facto different instruments, but they don't necessarily have to be perceived as different, they can alchemically combine to form a new unit. That means the boundaries between the I and the Other are constantly being merged and rebuilt, again and again, and in this way new dimensions are constantly being reached. It is a very plastic sound dialectic that repeatedly questions: what am I, and what is the Other?
DB: Where do you get the idea of this dialectic -- to put it another way, what is your vision when you develop a new work?
CC: Every material has a different, individual law of development. In Pnima, for example, I developed the orchestral material largely from a visual point of view, starting out, so to speak, with moving surfaces. For the old man's material, on the other hand, behaviors were important. I had observed homeless people in America and especially in Japan. Japan has a very strictly regulated society -- these homeless people are extremely marginalized and have developed extremely abnormal [abweichendes] behaviors. In Israel, too, there are these "crazy people" [Verrüchten] from back then who never found their way into society... I've observed people like this, and they fascinated me. Some of the musical gestures really came about as if someone had taken a microscope and captured not the external gesture, but the essence of a movement.
DB: The term “sound-psychogram“ comes to mind...
CC: Yes, that sums it up very well! Much of the musical material has the character of sound-psychographs. Sometimes I try to imagine the old man in a certain situation: I know exactly what he can and cannot do, but as he is trying to overcome these limits I imagine the movements, and not just the external ones, that he makes. This creates a sound-psychograph of the situation.
DB: You have traveled and roamed widely in your life, from Israel to Germany, some time in Japan, then went to San Diego in the US. Did national musical cultures play a role in your development?
CC: The contact with Germany has always been there, because my first teacher, Abel Ehrlich, who is incredibly important to me, came from Germany. He had a profound influence on me -- this search for the individual instead of simply adopting traditions, it all comes from him. But he also gave me tradition -- it was always a struggle, a dialectic between tradition -- which I respect very much -- and the search for freedom. I'm always looking for the point where tradition and freedom meet, both dissatisfied, but they meet. From America, little has left its mark, except perhaps the experimental movement: Harry Partch, Feldman, Cage, Varese, Ives. My teacher in Berlin, Dieter Schnebel, is also very closely linked to this movement philosophically, and perhaps this contact, this affinity for specific experimentalism and radicalism, came about through him. But Japan was also very important when I was 17 years old. I remember: I once turned on the radio and heard exactly the kind of music I had always imagined but couldn't compose at the time. It was gagaku music -- the whole orchestra as one voice, developing very slowly, as if looking at time through a microscope. And very important to me was Ono Kazuo's butoh dance, which I saw when I was 20 in Israel. I found it totally fascinating: every finger, every storyline, every tip of a hair was an individual organic unit of meaning -- you couldn't grasp it as one at first. That had a strong artistic influence on me: Here we have the theme of multiplicity and unity again...
DB: I could imagine that free jazz also means something, when the search for individual freedom is so important to you?
CC: Yes, of course, that's another very important influence from the US. It was there that I heard free improvisation for the first time, and since then I have been obsessed with capturing its freshness. Ironically, however, this is only possible if you really notate all the smallest shades of articulation very precisely. That's always my most difficult task when composing: nothing should sound manneristic, nothing should seem formulaic, everything should be spontaneous -- more spontaneous than life itself! Life always follows certain processes, certain paths and forms; and I want to break these trends. That's why it has to be notated very precisely -- it has to be revised again and again until it sounds as "free" as I imagine it. In this respect it was very important for me to have gotten to know free improvisation in the States. The instrumentalists who are playing my opera in Munich can all improvise fantastically, I've known them for years.
DB: And now they have to play exactly what’s on the page?
CC: And how exactly! But still -- knowing them, knowing how they play, that inspired me a lot when I was composing.
DB: Do you recognize yourself in Peter Ruzicka's proposition of a new modernity that overcomes the arbitrariness of available traditions?
CC: Of course! I've always had problems with postmodernism -- less in a political sense: I can even identify with it, because there is also a certain tolerance and freedom towards theories, towards ideologies — in this respect, some things that I like can find their place under the umbrella of postmodernism. But I cannot believe in an art that is arbitrary. I'm very strict about that. For me, rigor, strict consistency, forms the nervous systems in the organism of music. If that is missing, then the organism has no face. And without a face, without specificity of its individual necessity, I cannot bear witness to anything either.