Wolfgang Florey
Wer aus dem Feuer spricht
Duration: 36'
Choir: female choir
Solos:
baritone
Instrumentation details:
timpani
percussion
piano (+pno)
Wer aus dem Feuer spricht
Sample pages
Work introduction
Towards the end of October 20, an essay by Giorgio Agamben appeared in the NZZ. It really gripped me with its poetic power, not least due to the congenial translation by Barbara Hallensleben. Superficially, the author may have been concerned with the current measures in the pandemic, but his text reaches far beyond that. Two sentences preceded the article that make clear what he is about: bearing witness to our present - and: Civilisation will never have been the same.
While Michel Foucault's famous sentence about the disappearance of man still aims at an indefinite future, Giorgio Agamben brings this vision into the present. "Like a face of sand that the wave has erased from the shore, man is disappearing today." Not someday, but today. If we only want to, we can clearly recognise the signs of man's disappearance. Slowly weaned of his own responsibility, man is increasingly relinquishing his self-determination. Either because he is forced to do so by necessity or because he is tempted by convenience, he submits to powers that are completely inscrutable to him. Money has always been a source of power, but in ancient times kings and emperors invoked the grace of God. But those who rule the world today have never been empowered by any god. The old gods are long dead. Now money rules all by itself. Everything depends on its validity. It is the measure of all things. Valuation and monetary value are one. Everything has its price. Money provides people with sustenance and entertainment. People like to be wheedled. Obviously also by a corrupted political class, which apparently bases its decisions on scientific evidence and empiricism. Thus cunningly deceived, he obediently submits to state-bureaucratic, scientific-technological and secret service-police efficiency. In the same way, today's man likes to be entertained by an equally corrupted intellectual and artistic elite that knows how to captivate attention and manipulate consciousness. The incapacitation of man has made great strides. The cry of Kant, "have courage to use your own understanding", goes unheard in the vastness of a public discourse that is intellectually neglected and economically corrupted. Individual self-inflicted immaturity can hardly be spoken of any more. But if immaturity is general, it becomes apparent that people are placed under a guardianship from which there is no escape. The individual may quietly overcome his individual laziness, cowardice and comfort, but it is of no help to him. He would be lonely and socially isolated in the echoless space of his courageous enlightenment.
The failure of the Enlightenment alone, however, does not make man himself disappear. But the failure accelerates the pace of the catastrophe. For the human being, standardised in every way and robbed of his individuality, is finally what he is supposed to be: an object that can be controlled without will. Every human action is inscribed with a potential failure. The acting, active human being is a source of danger. And he is not only potentially so, but under the dictum of impending environmental catastrophes, man sees himself as the actual cause of the impending disaster. Therefore, it seems only logical that, in the interest of a better future for our planet, man as an active subject should be made to disappear. The extinction of a human self-determined being is therefore the actual goal of all efforts in the field of the development of artificial intelligence. Of course, the disappearance of the human being has a completely different dimension. We are reminded again these days that the determining elements of politics, i.e. the rule of people over people, also include the military securing of state spheres of power and the waging of wars. Because "capitalism carries war like a cloud carries rain" - to quote the French socialist Jean Jaurès - we are standing on the precipice of a war that makes the use of ABC weapons of mass destruction seem possible again. The threat of the annihilation of humanity through the arsenal of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons seemed to have disappeared completely from the rhetoric of everyday political life in recent years. In fact, however, the weapons systems were constantly being renewed and their efficiency increased. A suspected accident in a research laboratory has, as one must assume, caused a pandemic in autumn 2019, which has led to measures worldwide, the consequences of which humanity will have to bear for decades to come. The approaching flames can no longer be overlooked. Burning conflicts are visible everywhere. And the scorching words of the warmongers' incendiary speeches can no longer be ignored. But out of the fire itself speaks another voice: the voice of peace. And the voice of peace is always a voice committed to truth. Every speech is not just word after word, but reveals its true reason in its tone. Language finally finds its truth in the poetry of song. From time immemorial, fortune-telling has been one of the talents of women. Women were the divining priestesses of the Delphic oracle; women the pre-Christian sybils of the Orient and the South; women's voices testify to the transcendent origin of their seeric power. Singing, they announced true. Therefore, a choir of women's voices in this composition has the task of voicing their knowledge and prescience. The role of the solo counterpart, the function of the male voice, on the other hand, remains rooted in the reality of practical experience. It asserts its naive masculinity in a good sense. The character of the figure is marked by defiant determination and self-confidence. The music as a whole tells its own story. And this in a double sense. On the one hand, it follows the story of the text, and in its dramaturgical function it supports the tension in the dialogue between the four-part chorus of women and the solo voice. On the other hand, it is reminiscent of music-historical models: modal psalmody and simple song form; polyphonic madrigal and homophonic choral movement; free-floating melody without metrical binding and rhythmically sharply accentuating percussion; coarse marching and wild three-quarter time paraphrase evil music-historical practices. All this invites us to an uncomfortable ghost train ride through the ruins of music history. The composer contrasts the material concept of recent music history with his semantic conception of music. For him, it is a matter of clarifying the text with musical means and thus leaving traces in the memory of the listener.
Wolfgang Florey
Berlin, June 2022