Exil

This is a profoundly beautiful work but it also
contains some of the saddest music ever written. It opens with a setting of the 23rd
Psalm, followed by three settings of short, searing poems by Paul Celan, and
ends with Exil, a devastating poem by
Hans Sahl. Both of these poets knew exile and suffered from the Nazi atrocities
– Celan barely escaped with his life from a Romanian prison camp, and Sahl fled
Germany in 1933 and escaped
to America
on one of the last ships leaving Marseille in 1941. So although this work alludes
to Kancheli’s own exile from his home in Georgia, the texts he chose are
heavily weighed upon by memories of persecution and war. The music is uniformly
slow with spare, open writing and comparatively few of the extremes of dynamics
we have come to expect from his music. The composition is intensely introspective,
and the vocal part is sung almost without vibrato and demands a church acoustic
while the plaintive solo flute is almost Sufi-like in its depiction of the soul.There have been many, many settings of the 23rd Psalm, but none so luminous and
so tender. Kancheli’s setting is not the usual faith-filled declaration, but is
infused with an anguish, a restraint, reflecting the poems that follow which
will speak of loss of faith, despair, resignation. At the end of the 23rd Psalm
Kancheli attaches two phrases from Psalm 9: The
heathen are sunk down in the pit that they made (where the singer
crescendos upon the word gegraben
allowing some vibrato to enter in to powerful effect), and the mournful taped
voice of a child singing in Latin Lord
hear my voice, which the soprano urgently answers in German. The ending
evokes a serene annihilation.

The
Paul Celan poem Einmal is terse,
enigmatic and striking. It centres on a single extraordinary image – Once, I heard him, he was washing the world –
and closes with the single word Rettung
(salvation), echoing the religious atmosphere of Psalm 23.  The music hovers between ppp and pppp emphasizing
the fragility of the text, the violin joins the ensemble for the first time.

Celan’s
nihilist outlook is taken a step further in the setting of Zähle die Mandeln, whose text grows
increasingly obscure, courting deliberately absurdist imagery, this is underlined
by the introduction of the extraordinary voice of the bass flute. The act of
counting seems to be echoed in the music with droplets of sound. Celan’s Psalm, from his collection Die Niemandsrose, takes us into the even
more nihilistic realm of negative theology. The absolute despair of the text is
mitigated by the haunting beauty of the soprano’s line. Three times the music
bursts into fortissimo as if the idea of nothingness is too hard to bear.

The final poem is unbearably moving. With eerie beauty
the soprano tells a tale of loss and hopelessness, the simple lines sung
without a shred of sentimentality, the
voice imparting an other-worldly, supernatural freedom, as if liberated from
the restrictions of the vox humana. Near the end a brief climax of pounding
strings unleashes emotion long held in check before the final resigned
enunciation – zu spät, zu spät.