Hérodiade - Fragmente

Related Artists/Companies

Past Performances

National Symphony Orchestra: Christoph Eschenbach, conductor / Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 - Sep. 30 - Oct. 2, 2010

About the Work

Most music lovers know Herodias as the decadent Judean princess in Strauss' setting of Oscar Wilde's Salome, wife of Herod (who is also her uncle) and mother of the notorious title character. In the Gospels she plays a key role in the execution of John the Baptist, which became a point of departure for Wilde. Centuries later she became the focus of several literary treatments, including one by Flaubert that inspired an 1881 opera by Massenet (Hérodiade). The most psychologically dense of these, though, is a set of fragments that the poet Stéphane Mallarmé intended to make into full-scale drama in verse; he completed only three segments, in which Herodias is presented as a tortured, self-absorbed woman of considerable complexity. For his monodrama Hérodiade-Fragmente composer Matthias Pintscher drew bits from Mallarmé's monologues in which the heroine gazes into a mirror and reflects on the joys and horrors of her life. Instead of Wilde's bloodthirsty harpy, we see a woman who reminds us more of a distraught 18th-century operatic heroine, as Paul Griffiths has noted, but one whose expressive language "is that of a later and more complex time."

Hérodiade-Fragmente became a significant early milestone for Pintscher at its acclaimed 1999 premiere in Berlin, with Claudio Abbado leading the Berlin Philharmonic. Born in Marl in North Rhine-Westphalia, Pintscher studied violin and conducting and attended the Hochschule für Musik in Detmold. At age 19 he met Hans Werner Henze, who invited him to take part in the Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte festival in Montepulciano in 1991. In addition to Henze, his teachers and mentors have also included Pierre Boulez, Giselher Klebe, Manfred Trojahn, Peter Eötvös and Helmut Lachenmann. He has won a D.A.A.D. grant for study in Britain, the Prix Prince Pierre de Monaco, the Hindemith-Preis, the composition prize of the Salzburger Osterfestspiele and the Hans-Werner-Henze-Preis.

Pintscher has served as composer in residence for the Cleveland Orchestra, the Lucerne Festival, the RSO Saarbrücken, the Kölner Philharmonie, the RSO Stuttgart and, starting this year, the BBC Scottish Symphony. From 2007 to 2009 he was professor at the Hochschule in Munich, and this year he joined the faculty of New York University. His works continue to be championed by top musicians and organizations: Paris Opera, Christoph Eschenbach with the NDR Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra; Christoph von Dohnányi and the Cleveland Orchestra; conductor Simon Rattle; violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann; cellist Truls Mørk and flutist Emmanuel Pahud.
Authors and poets, particularly the French, have long fascinated Pintscher: In addition to the Hérodiade-Fragmente, his L'espace dernier is based on the life and work of Arthur Rimbaud. Thomas Chatterton depicts another literary hero of his and the songs and snow pictures are settings of poetry of e.e. cummings. Pintscher says he wants to "fascinate people so that they should listen more closely" and bring their own experiences into the listening process.
Nevertheless his scores are as complex as any being composed today. Hérodiade-Fragmente is scored for a large orchestra with an enormous percussion section, with divisi strings more the rule than the exception (into as many as 30 different parts at the conclusion). It is divided into discrete sections divided by long silences, with a more decisive delineation after Je meurs!
The solo part ranges widely but employs an unusually high overall tessitura; like Schoenberg's Erwartung, to which the piece is perhaps distantly related, it calls for fantastic flexibility, delicacy, defiance, and endurance. Among the subtle text depictions are the crystalline winds at eau froid, the coloration at profond (with bass clarinet and trombones joining the fray), the brass outbursts at horreur, the harsh dissonances of déserté and the delicate colorings of jardins d'améthyste. The final words of the first large section (Je meurs!) usher in the closest thing to lyricism in the piece, as if offering solace. The second large section begins with obscure, long-sustained notes punctuated pointillistically, but the soprano is newly resolute at J'aime l'horreur d'etre vierge. She fades back to uncertainty in the final bars, though, as her dreams of childhood fade into a flurry of shimmering filigree.

Translations courtesy of The Philadelphia Orchestra Association Copyright 2004. English translation by Darrin T. Britting.