Resident

When asked whether I'm staying in Russia, it is not a question. Terror attacks are a devastating reality of the time we live in. I was living in New York on 9/11/'02. In Israel every day is like this. I don't want to be anywhere else than I am right now. It is life. That doesn't mean that all days are happy. But when there is joy, it is my kind of joy. And sadness shared among Russians is a deepening of love that carries the capacity of even greater joy together.

Until recently I had a nationality but no country
Now I passed "For Russian Residents Only"
According to my fate and desire
For life, for love of people and One
Where my family is in music in art
To be with you increasingly.

Festivals will light up on the map
Music and art uniting people
In a score of worldwide running torches
Flames stronger than gunfire, louder than conflicts
Convincing, overpowering, attracting, expanding;
Creative energy will save the world.

A Life for the Tsar

Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka (1804-1857) is regarded as the founder of Russian music and his masterpiece 'A life for the Tsar', premiered at the Bolshoi Theatre in St. Petersburg in 1836, as the first true Russian opera.

The composer Glinka spent the best and most creative years of his life in St.Petersburg. He was influenced by the European musical tradition ( Beethoven, Bellini, Donizetti) but his genuine interest was the folkmusic of Russian native soil. As Tchaikovsky is (1840-'93), this makes Glinka also an 'Italo-Slav', the 'Slav' however being so vivid, versatile and intruiging it inspired purely Russian aims of the later 'kuchkists' (The Mighty Five, 1862, the self-trained group of composers: Balakirev, Cui, Moussorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov.)
The opera 'A Life for the Tsar' was a turning point in Glinka's life, for the work not only spoke to people directly as a deep celebration of patriotic feeling, but it became the origin and basis of a national voice, a one line passway to the heart of Russian music. The story is taken from true historic events; the invasion of Russia by the Poles early 17th century, and the hero is a peasant who saves the Tsar by giving his life.

According to the legend, Ivan Susanin, peasant from the Kostroma estate of Mikhail Fyodorovich, the first of the Romanov dynasty, saved Mikhail's life in the winter of 1612 by misdirecting the Polish troops who had invaded Russia in its 'Time of troubles' (1605-'13) and had come to Kostroma to murder Mikhail on the eve of his assumption to the throne. The Poles thought they had spied him, and asked Ivan Susanin to take them to the place. Ivan led the way and let the Poles get lost. The Poles killed Ivan, but couldn't get through the wilderness and all perished there. The Tsar was saved. As the opera progressed possible titles as 'Ivan Susanin' and 'To Die for the Tsar' were considered. The central idea to be expressed however was not a sacrifice, but one life giving way to a greater cause beyond the individual, the destiny of an entire nation. Therefore the emphasis on Life was right.

The musical fabric of the opera is built on the opposition of Polish elements (Polonaise, Cracovienne and Waltz) with sharp rhythmic intonations and Russian folksong material. The double beat measures that prevail in Russian music are contrasted with three beat measures, smooth movements with willful capricious ones, and an abundance of syncopated rhythmes from all sides.

As for the assimilation of 'ethnographic material' in Russian music, the first 'Collection of Russian Folksongs' was assembled by Nikolai Lvov and annotated by Ivan Prach in 1790. The distinctive features of the peasant chant -- colorful shifting tones, wild melodic dissonance, the quality of raw sonority that is missing in polished harmonies of Western music, the form to be shaped entirely by the content rather than formal laws of symmetry -- that would become such a feature of Russian musical style, could find their way to composers in search of authentic folkmaterial so that nearly all the folktunes in Russian repertory from Glinka to Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky were derived from Lvov-Prach.

Western composers also turned to this source for exotic Russian color and 'Themes Russes'. Beethoven's 'Slava' (Glory) chorus used in the Allegro opus 59 no1 was originally a 'sviatochnaya', a folk song sung by Russian girls to accompany their wishful rituals at the New Year. Trinkets would be dropped into a dish of water and drawn out one by one as the maidens sang their song. The simple tune became a great national chorus in the war of 1812, the Tsar's name being substituted for divine powers at the height of the Russo-Austrian alliance against Napoleon. ( I must refer to Orlando Figes, a historian from Birbeck College, University of London, who has written brilliant researches on Russian cultural history and whose books are always close at hand in my own studies of the Russian realm.)

Glinka likewise took over this 'sviatochnaya' peasant theme from the Lvov-Prach collection and suited it to Imperial staging in 'A Life for the Tsar'. Its climactic versions of the same 'Slava' chorus practically became a second national anthem in the 19th century. The choir concludes with the theme of grandeur of Russian people, the expanding force of the sound - the orchestra, brass, bells - gives rise to a feeling of joy and exultation, as expressed by Glinka.

Marking 200 years since the birth of Mikhail Glinka, the Mariinsky Theatre in St.Petersburg presents a new production of 'A Life for the Tsar'. A significant event in stage history for after years of Soviet censorship guises the opera is cleared out and the original version with the Baron de Rosen libretto and Glinka's ideas brought to light again. Premiered at the Mariinsky Theatre in May this year and the opera will open the new season on October 7, 2004.

Adin

Vstavayte, lyudi russkiye
Vstavayte, lyudi volniye!

Zhivim boystam pochot i chest
Ne bivat vragu
Putey na Rus ne vidivat
Poley Rusi ne taptivat

Za russkiy kray
Na Rusi bolshoy, vstavayte
Za nashu zemluyu chestnuyu!

The Amber Room

The Amber Room has been recreated : history rewrites itself as a unique 18th century interior at the Catherine Palace, one of the imperial residences of St.Petersburg environs, Tsarskoye Selo, opens its view once more.

Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli (1700-1771), the illustrious court architect joining Italian Baroque, French Classicism and Rococo with the intriguing tradition of Russian architecture, created the Amber Room in the 1750's. He decorated the interior with mosaic panels inlayed by pieces of amber, placed them between mirror pilasters, adding gilded carved ornament and a painted frieze. Allegories of the Five Senses, known as the 'Florentine mosaic', complete these sensations without distracting from the total design. The amber came from Prussia, as the panels were a gift presented to Peter the Great by King Fredrich Wilhelm I in 1716. Empress Elisabeth , daughter of Peter and Catherine, moved the panels to Tsarskoye Selo in 1755 where they were installed by Rastrelli.

The Amber Room at the Catherine Palace, Tsarskoye Selo

The Amber Room, ever since representing cultural and historical values of world significance, was plundered by the Nazi's, the panels were taken to Konigsberg, Eastern Prussia, in 1942 and lost without trace in 1945. Thourough investigation and systematic research started in 1967 with the foundation of the Commision for Searching the Amber Room. Designs for recreating the original interior were drawn from 19th century sketches, watercolors, daguerotypes, photographs. From a few fragments of the 'Florentine mosaic' the entire concept of the panels could be traced. It was an elaborate proces.

Last year, 2003, St.Petersburg's tricentennial, the Amber Room could open its doors to the public again.With the remarkable support of Germany, the amber panels have been recreated by St.Petersburg craftsmen. At the same time restorers of the Tsarkoye Selo Amber Workshop company completed the 'Florentine mosaic' that was discovered in Germany and returned to Russia by the German goverment.

This circle of history is the exceptional occasion when humanity can turn the course of events on world scale to the opposite to affirm their bonds and celebrate the necessity of shared cultural values.

The 'Brünnhilde' theme in Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen

While working on his 'magnum opus', Wagner's genius was inspired by the theme of evolutionary ending, as he experienced in his studies of ancient Greek drama. Aeschylus 'Oresteia', 5 BC, staged a succession of cosmic dynasties to question the power behind the course of human events (chorale ode, first part: Agamemnon). Each previous order had to give way to the new demands of man's evolving awareness. Aeschylus draws from Hesiod's 'Theogony'. After Chaos, first there was the order of Uranos, who ruled through violence, then came Cronos with his Titans, ruling through unreason, then the reasonable Zeus with Olympians, who guided man to think.

M. Owen Lee, in his publication of lectures held on Wagner and the Greeks; 'Athena Sings', 2003, states Wagner's 'Ring' to be a continuation of Aeschylus; it moves on to the next evolutionary stage in human development. Wotan, a Germanic Zeus, goes under as his predecessors had, and we face a future wherein a new (by Aeschylian count a fourth) power will direct the world.

From the leitmotif, a recurring musical theme, which is the only identification Wagner gives that power, the new force will be something akin to love; and it is already within us, it cannot be taken out of our systems. It has a feminine aspect for the motif Wagner gives it was associated in its previous appearance with the fathergod's daughter. Brünnhilde, like Pallas Athena, is the embodiment of a masculine will, a 'Speerjungfrau', a Valkyrie: "Wer bin ich, wär ich dein Wille nicht?" A forebode of this motif occurred in Act I of 'Die Walküre' by Sieglinde's recognition of the wolfs breed twins.

Wagner wrote six different versions of text for Brünnhilde to sing at the end of the 'Ring' before deciding he would let that 'new power' rising from the orchestra make the final statement. There is no text: the orchestra knows more than the characters know, it interprets the words on a deeper, subconscious level, somewhat like the lines of the chorus in ancient Greek drama. But the participation of the Greek chorus was of a more general, reflective nature, as judgement on the action. In Wagner's symphonic drama's, however, the orchestra will participate intimately in the motives of the action; the orchestra alone and not the singers will give the music its definite shape. In the end, in 'Gotterdämmerung', the old order is destroyed, consumed by fire. The flames will clean the Ring of Alberich's curse. The Rhine swells and its waves wash away the remains of the pyre. A leitmotif sounds over the waters of primeval nature, but it is not a return; it is a transformation. The tonality of the music seems to turn to its original key, but then shifts through a series of awe inspiring chord progressions to that mighty theme, which doesn't look back, but forward to a new beginning.

Last Saturday, 5/1/04, a spirited matter took place as a concert performance of the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen's four sectioned non-opera 'Matter' ('De Materie', 1989) had its U.S premier at Lincoln Center, by Asko Ensemble and Schoenberg Ensemble, with Reinbert de Leeuw conducting.

I was there too, as well as in 1989, when it premiered at the Nederlandse Opera, Muziek Theater in Amsterdam. The performance had an enormous impact on me at that time, and was received well by audiences and critics alike. I remember I went to the Donemus Foundation opposite the Stedelijk Museum later on to ask if I could listen to the tapes of a studio recording of De Materie again (there was no LP out yet), copying all the articles written about it, the playbill booklet within reach, reading on Stravinsky for parallels and 'The Apollonian Clockwork' Andriessen wrote together with Elmer Schoenberger. On the piano I had tried to find some chords, more or less by singing, because I never wanted to forget them. I can still see the scenes in my mind. And I didn't even like Robert Wilson, postmodernist, as an artist, but in these stage productions I thought he was splendid.

The all-including theme: To what extent matter can infiltrate spirit? -- is confronted by the composer in four musical 'essays':

• Part I , combining 17th century shipbuilding and atomic theory with the, by now, legendary 144 hammerblows, as once and for all real toccatas.
• Part II ('Hadewijch'), expanding the mystical visions of the 13th century poetess/nun within medieval music forms.
• Part III (De Stijl) is based on line divisions and primary colors of a Mondriaan painting and boogie-woogie rhythms.
• Part IV is on science and death, Marie Curie's writings in the context of the discovery of radium, and devastatingly beautiful poetry by Willem Kloos.

As musical ideas, first of all, are generating these transitions of matter in spirit, music itself is metaphore to the question: To what extent? Music, the sound we hear, is intangible and fleeting, yet takes shape in our sensors, recorded in our minds as succesion of intervals in time and movement in space (because direction is spacial). Audibilty is the matter; it exists.
Then, for instance, the descriptions of atomic theory by Gorlaeus (1651) in Part I, concerning 'the indivisible small parts', next to the reciting of materials and instruments being used for shipbuilding, 'woodblock', 'hammer', 'chisels', etc. These are abstractions of matter into mind.
What struck me especially of Part II in 1989 was how Andriessen had used the architectural blueprint of the medieval Cathedral in Reims and transferred the measures of the intervals between the collumns of the cathedral to intervals in chords of music and silences. Hadewijch wanders through these structures, both in music and as staged, evoking the sublime spirit in matter. There was also a reclining pose, resembling the well known Bernini sculpture for the Cornaro Chapel, Sta. Maria della Vittoria, in Rome: 'The ecstasy of St. Teresa' in marble (1652).
Of course the staging of Part III was in primary colors and Beppie Blankert in a red dress and black hat dancing forwards and backwards like a robot. A barpiano swinging away. I can't sit still when I hear it! And imagine, what people seldom realize is, that Mondriaans paintings are based on the most impossible nonsense theories about 'the perfect line','a line is a line when it never ends' etc. Part IV is of a chilling whiteness and the radiance of the element radium, material in its smallest indivisible parts, quantum mechanically changed to wavelenghts, perceived as light.

How questions of matter and spirit are politically related to the teachings of Karl Marx are, to my idea, more of a personal than of a general nature to the composer.

Victor Vasnetsov: Ivan Tsarevitch on the Grey Wolf (1889)
oil on canvas, 249 x 187 cm, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

A wonderous tale of pagan magic, connected with a mythic bird, which fused 'Kaschei the Immortal' into the scenario for Stravinsky's 'Firebird'. Here Ivan Tsarevitch and the Princess are rescued by a wolf; in other Vasnetsov paintings they can be seen on a flying carpet.

To the lives of
Those unknown to me
Whose grief has
Inextricably become
Intertwined with mine.

To the selfless emotion
Of two ones yielding
Guilty of nothing
But life's unfolding
Return in source.

May forgiveness be
Judgement postponed
Life be lived

To lives.

One of the things I accepted in my life is the reality of metaphysical dimensions; that when there is a very high field of energy active, corresponding frequencies start to resonate. Not identical to this source, but parallel lines, coloring towards it, reinforcing. a network texture. These lines appear to us as coincidences or accidents, whether wanted or unwanted in our projective desire, and I guess we are all too human not to be sensitive for it. Common sense tells us the resemblances are highly unlikely, but still there is this strangeness. Why does it occur now? And just consider it isn't the most common denominator we're dealing with here.

So it is hard not to freak out metaphorically over a Michael Kimmelman sentence, New York Times 03/26/04, quoting historian Peter Brown on the Byzantine exhibit in the Metropolitan Museum: " ... bring to the earth a touch of the true (..)...Byzantine painting is a courtly art in that, at the center stands a court thought of as a clear mirror of the court of heaven." " But just because that center is, itself, a mirror," he continues, " so the glory caught in its reflecting surface can also be caught faithfully in innumerable smaller mirrors. And in this world of infinite reflections, what you see is what takes you to the treshold of what you 'fervently long' to get. Great or small, at Constantinople or in a distant village, there is always a glory beyond the glory that you see." Striking bedazzlement.

What I didn't know was:
1557 -".. a German scholar, Hieronymus Wolf, came up with the word 'Byzantium', derived from the name of an ancient Greek town, Byzantion, near which Constantinopel was founded, to describe what had then become a phenomenon of history, a lost empire of Hellenic origins based on the Bosphorus, the past of Yeats's future dreams."

In portraying the other
I also painted me

It is my eyes too
Looking at you reflected
Within me without you
What we see is the same.

The masked man
Spy in the palace
Behind columns
In eyesight flight
A tip of his cape.

It is the King who
Decides in disguise
To visit the sorceress
Madame Clairvoyant
And test her powers
For himself.

Her crystal sphere
However signs: "No If "
Totally focussed
Until it explodes
In a mist of
Thousand and one
And happy ever after.

Heaves and thrusts
Metric convulsion
Pounding downbeats
Accents increase
Torn into raw edges
Of static suspense.

There is the moment
Before sound or being
Gravity of impulse
Recollection in
Sudden arms
To fall to rise
Broad chested.

    - - - - -

Nomadic tribes, as their
Horses swift and brave,
Ruled Eurasian steppes
Eight century BC; I hear
They are still alive.

The Scyths, these
Mythical ancestors
Of Eastern Slavs,
Evoked Asian Russia
Among those seeking
'Savage hordes'
To challenge the
European thin veneer.
Pre- Petrine, although
The Great himself
Treasured a collection
Excavated gold from
Burial mounds in the Crimea.
The Caucasus became
To Russians Europe's 'Orient',
And, even more so
Because
It was themselves.Among those was Nikolai Roerich (1874-1947), painter and archeologist, fascinated by the rituals of prehistoric Slavs. Stravinsky's ballet "Le Sacre du Printemps" with Nijinsky choreography, which had a shocking Paris premiere in 1913, was based on traces of ancient rituals; a Scythian midsummer rite, 'Kupala', which involved human sacrifice and 'Semik', a pagan rite of spring linked to the sun god Yarilo. The idea for "The Rite of Spring" took form as a pantheistic hymm to nature,as conceived by Roerich.

The Scythian world is one of movement, moving horses, leopards, deer, soaring flight of eagles, sway of womans garments. Change was intrinsic and the only constant element in their culture; their life depended on it. It was excactly their sense of continuity that caused them to move, to experience evolution and transformation. The intriguing images on preserved artifacts from the 'kurhans' recall a notion of dialectic lifeforces, equally reversible to optimalize a level of energy, overflowing into the magical world of animated nature. Zoomorphic fusions, like winged lions, griffins, sphinxes, as well as the many predator scenes of animals in mortal struggle suggest this experience. The deer on the golden plaque with the antlers branching into stylized ondulations is, in fact, not seen as object of prey but as the source of life to its predator. Scyths are also known to drink the blood of the first man they kill, for transition of strenght, in order for life to continue increasingly.
While rooted in Central Asia, Scythian culture and art were enriched through contact with the Greek world and the civilizations of the ancient Near East. Herodotus devoted almost his entire book 'Histories' to the northern Black Sea region, not only describing the Greeks in these colonies, but speaks extensively about the Scythians and the interconnections. Indeed a Hellinized sensibility enters into the Scythian idiom in the 4th century BC.

Scythian art, an amazing witness of a deeply rooted culture, highly conscious concept of life and boundless imagination, can be seen in St.Petersburg's Hermitage. I saw it for the first time in 1988 in a Munich exhibit "Das Gold der Scythen", later on in Amsterdam in the Nieuwe Kerk on Dam square in the 90's. Prokofiev's 'Scythian Suite' of 1915 in the outstanding interpretation of conductor Valery Gergiev, Ossetian and quite a Scyth himself, inspired me to the painting 'Daybreak' in 2001, but it was 1997 when I heard it. I did paint "le Sacre" too, in1991. You can say the Scyths have haunted me, in the best way ever.

Mediterranean and 'del Mare'
The Greek named 'kalamos'
A reed pen for writing
Pre Homeric, Latin's later
'Calamarius' (genetivus)
The fish 'of the reed pen'
Ink fish; the creature
I speared on my fork
To devour, tentacles and all,
Highly cultivated in an
Italian Restaurant.

Below that veil
On ocean floor
Look up and see
The shattered light
In dancing surface
Sun rays through
Waves of immensity
The sea is my realm
I speak in the
Aquatic whisper
Of fringing reefs
Was a dolphin before
Cast in a human spell.

(A friendly evening with a dear scientist who observes the deep and whom I go out to dinner with once a year. And , yes, there was the interview voice at a distant table, saying 'I prefer not to know' , after which he sharpened his ears. I have no idea what is on their minds, or rather, I prefer not to have an idea, but cautiously got into the opposite diguise.')

Steely jump,
My feet on iron
Platform across.
The jump was in the sound:
From staccato street
To loud metallic -
Landed on one boot,
The other joined in pace.

I was horse and rider
In clear night sky,
Wildly determined
To be Hunter
Or Prey.
At the opposite hall
I asked a suppoost and
Went straight through a
'Do Not Enter'.

(stairs, stairways, corridors,
empty rooms, curious eyes)
Then suddenly turned and left
As fast as I came,
Too aware.

"Power of ostinato, by repetition it only increases,
establish level of energy, incredible organisation rhythmically,
Prokofjev loved this challenge to find a new formula,
newly developed, it's like a machine, listen to Alexander Nevsky,
from the beginning, /chak/chak/chak/chak/ - it goes on and on - "

'Stay with us, don't go away', said the biographer,
(* a terrible teaser but not truly unfriendly)
accordingly ironic quoting a CNN cliffhanger,
and I, high in my defence, mimed: 'No!'
Meaning the contrary, I saw, you mistook me for.
(Once, I was collective: 'us' as in 'audience'.)
Now "Pas d'Acier" is the only way.