--- translationKey: lieder_im_entgleiten title: Lieder im Entgleiten subtitle: For baritone, large orchestra, offstage orchestra, voices from afar and a boy actor # instrumentation: # - Baritone # - Orchestra tags: - orchesterwerke - vokalmusik --- > Transience plunges everywhere\ > into a deep being. > > — Rainer Maria Rilke > Even beauty must perish.\ > Yet all who depart in beauty\ > shall rise again in beauty. > > — Friedrich von Schiller, _Nänie_; Rainer Maria Rilke, _Engellieder_ The _Lieder im Entgleiten (Songs in the Slipping Away)_ is an opulent and expansive work for baritone, large orchestra, distant orchestra, voices from afar, and a boy actor, setting texts by poets of varying periods and traditions. Across nine stations — whose formal and thematic boundaries grow increasingly fluid as the work progresses — the cycle traces the stations of human feeling and experience with both sensitivity and intensity: the living and the slipping away. In the ‘conversations’ of the lyric self with its soul, its awakening, transcendence, elevation, and ‘transfiguration in song’, the work reaches beyond the horizon of human experience. Uniting the lyrical, the dramatic, the epic, the symphonic, and the scenic — and spanning the boundaries of formal genres — the cycle addresses itself to that great singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, to whom it is posthumously dedicated, and who mastered and embodied all these forms. Drawing sustenance from primordial wisdom — the texts of the high culture of ancient Egypt and of the Old Testament — as well as from the words of great philosophers and mystics, from poetry both ancient and recent, the libretto coalesces into a drama that can be lived anew, carrying the audience along on the soloist’s journey until space and time themselves dissolve. Despite its title — and precisely because of it — the _Lieder im Entgleiten_ celebrates life: earthly life (‘To be here is glorious!’, the lyric self calls out to us in the words of Rainer Maria Rilke) and eternal life, life in the general sense and the life of the artist, the singer, in particular. The eminent intellectual Manfred Osten has engaged deeply with the work. Grateful acknowledgement is made here to [his essay](/manfred-osten-lieder-im-entgleiten-hommage-a-dietrich-fischer-dieskau/). ## Station I — It Is Our Glory to Bloom From afar, words from Rainer Maria Rilke’s _Duino Elegies_ are heard. They are a profession of faith and an expression of love for life, for the earth, for nature: ‘Earth, … you need no more of your springs to win me over’ Death is regarded as a necessity, indeed as the earth’s ‘sacred inspiration’, and the tentative question as to the reason for this ‘span of existence’ is answered with a compelling, resounding aphorism: ‘Because to be here is much!?? The song that follows, _Entgleiten_, setting a poem by Hartmut Oliver Horst, is no mere musical preamble but the primordial ground and germinal cell of the entire cycle — literary as well as musical. Numerous ideas — motifs, themes, gestures, orchestrational details, harmonic sequences, mood-pictures and the like — are here established and, as the cycle unfolds, spun ever further into a web of relationships of the greatest density. The first strophe of the Horst song is a description of nature, and of transition. It depicts ‘time’ rising ‘from a moment of passing’, its dissolution into ‘undetermined longing’, finding its counterpart in the image of ‘black cranes that drift towards a distant red sun’. The music meets the grandeur of these images with the ‘rustle of nature’ (woodwinds, high strings, two harps, and percussion including celesta), with interval-sequences symbolising time (first harp, then the vocal soloist), with the cranes’ yearning call, the glittering and radiance of the orchestra — the light itself, akin to the ‘red sun’. The ‘slipping away’ is given lyrical form through a double image with wondrous effect: the dissolution of contours — like a dusk, a twilight of existence — and the quiet ebbing of all desire. If earthly time is time laden with inherent longing, then ‘time without time’ (Johann Rist) is time stripped of all will and wishing, a state otherwise perhaps accessible only in the depths of meditation. In the second strophe, death ‘takes on form, enveloped in such silence’. Trombones intone its striding theme, an enigmatic harmonic sequence that — in apparent paradox — contains within itself the static, the endlessly falling, and the eternally ascending. Dr Manfred Osten here recalls the formulation of that prince of poets so admired by Fischer-Dieskau, in _Faust II_: ‘Descend then! I might equally say: Ascend!’ Such an abolition of dualities and ‘direction’ — encountered in Goethe in the realm of the ‘Mothers’ — likewise points towards the infinite. ‘Light loses itself deeper into the night, following the dark trace of a single tone’, a trace that ‘fades mysteriously in dissolving sound’. Cellos and low woodwinds caress with warm timbres. Then comes a transformation of the song’s formerly spring-like opening and its foundational intervals into a brief dramatic scene, descending to the deepest reaches of the orchestra. The eventual dissolution of sound, as prescribed by the text, is taken up as metaphor by the cor anglais, which delivers a wistful melody in solo, then fades to silence. These unexpectedly dramatic, elegiac sonorities simultaneously anticipate the final ‘short strophe’ of the poem, which is delivered in speech: > And on the flowers lies the dew like quiet mourning. --- Further words from afar, drawn from the _Duino Elegies_. These too, in the interpretation offered here, are suffused with a sense of slipping away; Rilke, like Horst, calls upon images from nature: ‘Like dew from the morning grass, what is ours rises from us’. Finally, Rilke seems to take up the cor anglais’s elegiac tone in verse, continuing it with his words: ‘For staying is nowhere’. --- The song that follows joins Justinus Kerner with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. This is the actual, the physical depiction of that slipping away, which Kerner captures in the image of a rotting tree: > Already I incline towards the earth; I sound like a dying song. Here again that wondrous conjunction of a fading with sound, with song, as the conclusion of the entire cycle may convey in its apotheosis. The lyric self, however, is reconciled with death — or, depending on one’s reading, pleads for such reconciliation: ‘Let my death be to my liking!’ It thus seems evident that its slipping away occurs in a phase of human and artistic maturity, as though the Fates had granted the artist that ‘autumn of ripened song’ for which he himself had prayed (cf. Friedrich Hölderlin, _An die Parzen_). And in Hölderlin, too, the image of music once again! Kerner’s final words — ‘to bloom, to bear fruit, and to decay!’ — seem to be taken up by Goethe, who cites Kerner’s ‘decay’ emphatically, almost indignantly, as if in antithesis: > No being can dissolve into nothing! — an assertion confirmed by the natural sciences and elevated into the metaphysical in the hope of the soul’s immortality. Musically, these words of Goethe’s are rendered in a striking fashion: the striding death-theme — in which (dis)integration and resurrection both inhere, and which here is of an entirely different character, not solemnly striding but assertive and energetic, as though Goethe himself were declaiming — is transposed upwards step by step, its sublimely ever-ascending tendency intensified as if by a great upward surge. ## Station II — The Wisdoms and Conversations The texts of the ‘Wisdoms’ draw primarily from the Bible (_Book of Wisdom_, _Ecclesiasticus_, and others); yet elevated thoughts, aphorisms, and apothegms of great thinkers are also gathered here, among them words of Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Mahatma Gandhi, Omar Khayyām, Manfred Osten, Leo Tolstoy, and ancient Egyptian texts. The musical core and point of departure is a kind of refrain: ‘Hear, O man!’ — an outward-directed injunction to receive the wisdom that follows and to turn it over, as it were, in one’s heart. The musical setting of wisdom as the Bible portrays it may surprise: swift, impetuous, festive, assertive, darting, virtuosic — the music has the quality of a central _scherzo_. ‘For wisdom is more mobile than any motion’, as the _Old Testament_ puts it. The exhortation > therefore, O man, love wisdom, let her guide thee! is the central statement of the text and of its music — music that here presents wisdom, scored as a tutti, in all its overwhelming force. Further ‘Hear, O man!’ calls are followed by further wisdoms, each set in a markedly different character, thereby displaying the full range of sonic possibilities afforded by the large orchestra. The seventh and final wisdom, however, is a complete and self-contained poem and song: > Live the love\ and learn to know pain!\ You are silent\ and ripen towards life’s last understanding. > > Know how to die! The music endeavours to match this lapidary utterance (text by Hartmut Oliver Horst): caressing lines between cellos and baritone, falling gestures, and sounds of extinction in the close. --- The ‘Conversation with the Soul’ is heard once more as speech from afar. It is a question-and-answer exchange drawing on words from, among other sources, the _Egyptian Book of the Dead_, Thales of Miletus, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Victor Hugo, and — in recurrence — Omar Khayyām. The lyric self interrogates its soul on the nature of world and death and life. It is a mythic teaching-dialogue. The final question is that concerning his own identity. The soul does not answer it directly, it would seem. A simple answer to so vast a question appears too frail. So she causes a boy to step forward — a signifier for the singer himself, his inner child, a manifestation of his experience and spiritual substance, perhaps the soul’s own embodiment. Yet the lyric self cannot (yet) recognise itself in the boy. > You are not _you._\ You are he\ who walks at your side … the boy’s voice offers as a guiding thought (after a poem by Juan Ramón Jiménez). Only in the final image of the song cycle will the lyric self come to understand these prophetic words and recognise itself in the boy. Whilst the _Wisdoms_ are directed outward — formally, towards the audience — the _Conversations with the Soul_ are turned inward. Both forms of this encompassing dialogue may be understood as interior states experienced with increasing frequency by the lyric self during its slipping away. The outer world recedes ever more, until in a later phase it ‘is no more’ (Alexander Pope). ## Station III — Annunciation This orchestral song, too, works with a refrain: ‘Death stands before you today!’ — words from the ancient Egyptian _Dialogue of a World-Weary Man with His Soul_ — called out to the lyric self, much like the ritualised ‘Memento mori!’ cries at Roman triumphal processions, reminding the triumphator of his mortality. The music of the individual annunciations is powerful, dissonant, and austere. These words are answered each time with a simile: > … like the fragrance of myrrh, the fragrance of lotus flowers. — which in turn flows into a petition drawn from the _Egyptian Book of the Dead_: ‘Mayest thou be the pure lotus flower!’ Whilst the baritone delivers the similes unaccompanied, the petitions are borne by an enigmatic harmonic sequence, sounds of archaic power befitting the four-to-four-and-a-half-thousand-year-old texts. The final sequence of annunciation / simile / petition forms a unity and a great intensification. The baritone’s line is vast, seeming without end, and leads ‘to triumph’, as is said in the [_Weltenlied_](/weltenlied/), which shares its music with this passage. One is already tempted to cry out with the _Old Testament_: ‘O death, where is thy victory?’ — and precisely in the moment of that very sudden annunciation of death. The final petition (‘Mayest thou go forth by day!’) carries a particular distinction: ‘Going forth by day’ is the actual title of the _Egyptian Book of the Dead_, and this closing wish is thus a tribute to that epochal work. Worthy of note, too, is that none of the types of text — the proclamatory cry, the simile, the petition on behalf of one consecrated to death — are uttered by the lyric self (even though the soloist performs them all). The lyric self appears largely detached, in the position of _patiens_. The literary and dramatic effect — relative to the _Wisdoms_ and the _Conversations with the Soul_, in which the lyric self was still engaged in dialogue with its interior — is with the _Annunciation_ intensified yet further. ## Stations IV and V A sense of wonder at the new reality (Station IV, texts by Alexander Pope, Paul Celan, Michelangelo, Maḥmūd Shabistarī and others, delivered in speech) is followed in Station V by an extended fugue for baritone and orchestra. ‘My soul, I follow you …’ is its text, and this act of following is set with contrapuntal artistry as an _imitatio animae_. Yet this is a following into a new ‘other world’: ‘an ever-onward floating, transfixed by light, barely to be explained’. The fugue is scored for strings alone (extensively divided), to which is also entrusted the illumination of the ‘light-images’ in the text, rendered in all their sonic splendour. Then a sudden change of sonority. The reduced wind complement (woodwinds and two horns only) depicts ‘unending falling’ with a likewise falling motif — one of the many already heard in the opening song, _Entgleiten_. Contrapuntal intensification towards the close. The subject sounds once more in the strings, yet simultaneously in many voices and at differing tempi: a distinctive form of stretto and parallel leading. Whilst most of the songs and pieces set ‘compilations’ — texts by different poets, from different genres and periods, yet connected in ways often complex and subtle — this song is the third to be based on a single poem _in toto_, once again a poem by Hartmut Oliver Horst. It was the finding of an extensive literary search that no other poems fitted so naturally, in content and in style, into the present cycle, forming as they do its literary foundation. That the poet has moreover accompanied the genesis of the work with close attention lays upon me an obligation of deep gratitude. ## Station VI — An Enchantment Following the idea of ancient Egyptian spells that open the gateway to the afterlife, it is here likewise an enchantment (text: _Egyptian Book of the Dead_ and Paul Celan) that leads what has died back — or rather, forward — into life: ‘See how life stirs all around’. The orchestra enters with these spoken words, magnificent music that draws together what has come before in a great synthesis. A purely symphonic movement. The singer is silent. A renewed wonder. ## Station VII — Elevation and Transfiguration Over ever-upward-striving gestures in the orchestra, words spoken from afar and words sung are joined — as in the ‘Annunciation’ — from different kinds of text: an exhortation (‘Rise up, thou weary one!’), a description of a phase of elevation (‘The flesh is lifted up’), a refrain (‘See: the Open!’), and finally a greeting: ‘Be thou welcomed, for thou art protected and alive!’ A _transfiguration_. Texts from the _Egyptian Book of the Dead_, the _Egyptian Book of Gates_, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jean de la Croix, Friedrich Hölderlin, and others. Of particular significance: though he is not visible, the greeting is delivered by the boy’s voice. ## Station VIII — Eternal Being in Song — Epilogue A chorale sounds in solemn tones, to which familiar motifs are gradually mingled, as if rising from deep memory. A final ‘So hear, O man!’ A recollection — now of the invocations of the Wisdom station. And at last the lyric self responds — for the first time — honouring all the ‘Hear!’ exhortations of the Wisdom station in their final fulfilment: > I listen. Yes — I hear.\ It is a singing, a song. And concluding with those words wrested from Rainer Maria Rilke: ‘Song is eternal being’. ## Station IX — Scene The final scene is accorded a station of its own, affirming its significance for the work as a whole by virtue of its manifold interpretive possibilities. A further great musical synthesis in the orchestra serves as epilogue, and the boy appears once more. Singer and boy behold each other — indeed, they recognise each other, recognise themselves as one. The boy takes the singer’s place. The soloist withdraws into the distance.