German clarinettist Jörg Widmann, who brings his compositions to Sligo this weekend, has been writing down the music in his head since childhood – but it took him years to discover that this was not the same as being a composer, he tells MICHAEL DERVAN
IT'S AN UNUSUAL combination. Jörg Widmann is a clarinettist and a composer. And don't think for a moment that he's just a clarinettist who composes on the side. His work has been played by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under Pierre Boulez. Germany's Opernweltmagazine selected his opera, Das Gesicht im Spiegel(The Face in the Mirror), as the premiere of the season in 2004. His five string quartets are currently the subject of a series at London's Wigmore Hall. And he's got strong associations with Ireland, having played at the Vogler Spring Festival in Sligo (his Fourth Quartet is dedicated to the Vogler Quartet), the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, and at home and abroad with the Irish Chamber Orchestra and Anthony Marwood, a collaboration he remembers with special pleasure.
He began early, taking up the clarinet at the age of seven, and, according to his publisher, starting his composition studies at the age of 11. It wasn’t quite that simple, though, says the man himself. “I would not call it studying composition. And I would not call what I wrote at that time ‘compositions’. I tried. In the beginning I wrote waltzes in F major. Recently I came across one of the pages. I laughed, because there was something about the harmony that I can still understand. Of course, most of it I don’t understand any more.
“The reason I started writing was because I always improvised at home, made up things on the clarinet. And the next day, I would be annoyed because I couldn’t remember properly what I had played the day before. I really wanted to find a way to write down music. There was a big misunderstanding for me at the beginning, because I thought composing is writing down music – which it basically is, probably. But, unfortunately, quite soon I had to find out through very good teachers that it’s much, much more and that I really didn’t know anything about it.”
He seems to have spent a long time resisting the idea that he would have to master the techniques of composition. Initially, he says, he took “an emotional approach” to the challenges of construction and form. When he went to study with the composer, Hans Werner Henze, the great man warmed him up by saying how much he was looking forward to their work together, but chilled him with a precondition: he would have to take up the study of Fux counterpoint, referring Widmann to a tome which first appeared back in the early 18th century.
It’s easy to imagine how Widmann must have felt. He gives the impression of being anything but academic in his approach to music and life in general, in spite of the fact that he’s been a professor of clarinet at the Freiburg Hochschule für Musik since 2001, and has recently started taking on composition students. If there’s any constant in his conversation, it’s a sense of ceaseless wonder and inquiry.
WHEN WE MEET in Freiburg, he is tired but voluble. He has hardly slept, he says, for three nights, working on a composition that just won’t let go of him. As we talk, ideas just tumble out, from concerns about the piece he’s working on, to graphic illustrations of the problems of harmony or fine points of instrumentation that he’s struggling with, not to mention quickfire responses to passing comments and the elaborate detours he can take on issues that strike him with greater force.
Following on from his reference to composing as just writing down music, I mention the danger of simply writing down what’s in your head, as what you hear there might not be your own.
“Maybe that’s the great challenge about composing, and also the great danger, that you have an idea and you are absolutely happy with it,” he says. “And at the moment it’s created, you are not even sure if you created the idea, or the idea created itself. It’s a miracle.
"The problem starts when our brain joins the game. Then, with me, I always end up with the opposite idea. I once wrote a piece called Insel der Sirenen(The Island of the Sirens). My idea was that all the notes of the whole piece would be high harmonics for 19 strings with solo violin, essentially the notes you find in the highest two octaves of the piano. When you have an idea like that, it's fine for some days. After one week, the only question is: when will the first low note come? That makes you crazy, upset. You doubt the idea. I'm deeply convinced that it's a dialectical thing.
“With everything in life, and in composing especially, there is a third thing coming out from this fight between these two ideas.”
He jumps from composing to performing, to explain how “when you are really young, you give everything on stage, you play for the moment, and you think it’s good”. But he has changed. He’s dropped the goal of “simply giving fire to everything” and feels that, as a result, he can now play with an even greater, deeper energy, but in a way that’s more controlled. He sees it as both a loss of innocence and a regaining of innocence.
His fear was about the loss of spontaneity, “about what might get lost if you play something in a certain way early on because you know it will come back in the last movement and you plan what you do. I felt guilty. Because I thought maybe I am betraying my ideals. Now I think I know I would have betrayed myself if I had not changed my practice of giving energy all the time.”
It’s good, he chuckles, to have something in reserve at the end of a work such as the Brahms Clarinet Quintet.
Widmann has only good things to say about his teachers, however challenging the relationships may have been from all sides. “They all helped me to find my own voice.”
Henze made him do 12-tone exercises, probably to develop his melodic sense, he says. In spite of his being a performer on a melodic instrument, his musical thinking is much more harmonic than melodic. Heiner Goebbels thrust him in the direction of electronic music, “which made me rethink certain things I had taken for granted”, and “we talked a lot about transitions. They’re a big thing for me. Sometimes when playing, I can enjoy a transition much more than arriving”. With Wolfgang Rihm, “you would have to fight a lot to talk about craftsmanship questions. If you brought him a huge symphonic score, he would silently look at it for 10 minutes, and, by instinct or by knowledge, don’t ask me, he would point at the place which is the problematic place in the score. It was really scary, sometimes. And he asked me the right questions. He didn’t always answer. But he asked the right questions.”
But, especially when young, Widmann also exercised the freedom to learn by making mistakes.
“I wrote an early orchestral piece, and I made all the mistakes I possibly could,” he says. “My teachers told me that if you have the flute in that low register and there are three trombones playing at the same time, you won’t hear the flute. As a young person, you don’t believe it. Then you attend the first orchestral rehearsal, and it’s quite obvious.”
It’s good to be that fearless, he thinks, because the technical challenges of new music are just so much greater than they’ve ever been before. It’s good not to be afraid, although he does admit that “when I discovered what I was lacking, it came as a shock. For a long time, I had a lack of craftsmanship.”
HE'S ALTOGETHER MORE circumspect when it comes to the music of the past. And the music of the past is not just with him as a player, but also as a composer. His Fieberphantasie, which will be heard at the Vogler Festival on Sunday, has its roots in Schumann. His Echo-Fragmente(Echo Fragments) has a solo clarinet bridging the microtonal differences between two orchestras, one a period- instruments band, the other a modern symphony orchestra (Freiburg, population 217,547, has both).
“Mozart is the most complex thing in the world,” he says. “I deal a lot in my compositions with music history, but I really hope I do it as somebody who is aware of this tradition and treats it with utmost respect. I sometimes have the impression my love for this music is almost too great. It’s been an issue that I haven’t dared to do certain things.
"For example, in the Mozart year, I was asked so many times to write a piece about Mozart. I couldn't. How would I dare? What I decided to do was write an orchestral piece about an instrument he wrote for in a wonderful way, the glass harmonica – my orchestral piece, Armonica. But in no bar is there any hint of Mozart. There is a transparency I tried to achieve, which is another angle, dealing with the Mozart phenomenon.
“To me, the contact with the masterpieces of the past is a daily one, and humbleness comes by itself. You stand in front of these masterpieces and you try to realise . . .”
For once, he seems lost for words. “The older one gets the more one thinks how a certain phrase, a simple phrase, is supposed to sound. The questions get harder and harder.”
Jörg Widmann features as both composer and clarinettist at the Vogler Spring Festival in St Columba’s Church, Drumcliffe, Co Sligo. The festival runs from this evening until Monday afternoon. Details and booking: 01-5059582, www.tinyurl.com/cuvoo2
