I Die Lotosblume ängstigt sich (The Lotus Flower fears)

For soprano and chamber orchestra (flute, horn, trumpet, harp, piano, accordion, one percussionist (claves, triangle, crotales, bass drum), violin, viola, cello, and bass)
Premiere: September 20, 1997, in the Broadcast Hall of the Austrian Radio ORF, in the 10th anniversary concert of the Ensemble Wiener Collage, with Maria Landreth and René Staar
Duration: ca. 5 minutes
Score: ECA Nr. 6033

II Lotosblume (Lotus Flower)

For baritone and chamber orchestra (flute, clarinet, horn, trumpet, harp, piano, accordion, one percussionist (crotales), 2 violins, viola, cello, and bass)
Premiere: September 20, 1997, in the Broadcast Hall of the Austrian Radio ORF, in the 10th anniversary concert of the Ensemble Wiener Collage, with Michael Ingham and René Staar
Duration: ca. 5 minutes
Score: ECA Nr. 78002

About the songs:

For 1997 the Ensemble Wiener Collage had planned a large-scale Heine project with contributions by six composers. Since this proved to be unfeasible, only the Heine Fragments by René Staar were integrated into the ensemble’s anniversary concert.

The two poems by Heine used here are The Lotus Flower (the famous love poem from the Lyrical Intermezzo, familiar to music lovers through Schumann’s setting), and the late poem Lotus Flower, where Heine decades later, fatally ill and bedridden, cared for by his last love “Mouche”, refers ironically to his own renowned earlier poem.

For the composer, the Heine Fragments turned out to be an equivocal experiment. This new setting of the texts, not intended as a recomposition of Schumann and also not as a critical working through of a romantic and romanticizing idiom, has the effect of an acoustic sketch. Immediately striking is the iridescent harmonic structure, through which the composer intended to express something quite different from Schumann. Important here are not only the feelings expressed through the poetic language, but also the sound of the language itself and the deep symbolism behind the words. Sun and moon are equated with the longing which is openly manifested in the exalted last strophe of the first poem, to which the second poem then ironically refers. The attitude of the second song contrasts sharply to that of the first, particularly through the gallows humor that appears. The naïve longing for love of the first is through sickness and awareness of nearing death shifted to another level.

No single basic mood was determining for the composition, but rather the interpenetration of various levels of consciousness, characteristic for the state of longing. Staar’s tonal language, compared to that of the earlier Else Lasker-Schüler songs, has here become much more abstract and radical. The vocal lines are subject to the course of the harmony, whose linear progression is manifested in the overall spectrum of the composition.

The instrumentation also mirrors the contrast between the two songs and is (corresponding to the development of the Ensemble Wiener Collage) shot through with highly individual tone colors, provoked by an atypical instrumentation.

The composer has here for the first time generated the interior harmonic connections in his work by means of a computer program which he developed together with Gottfried Hinker. This led to new compositional ideas which were then incorporated into the songs.

Lyrics:

The lotus-flower cowers,
Under the sun’s bright beams;
Humble and bowed with meekness
She waits for the night among dreams.

The Moon, he is her lover,
He wakes her with his gaze;
To him alone she uncovers
The fair flower of her face.

She glows and grows more radiant,
And gazes mutely above;
Breathing and weeping and trembling
With love – and the pain of love.

{translated by Louis Untermeyer, New York 1917}

Lotus

Quite clearly, this couple’s making
A most unusual sight,
The sweetheart's unsteady when walking,
But worse is her lover’s plight.

She’s like a poor little kitten,
While he’s as sick as a hound;
I wager the thinking of neither
Rates as especially sound.

Their souls are closely wedded,
But neither could tell you, if pressed,
Just what the other is keeping
Hid between soul and vest.

That she is a lotus blossom
Mam’selle is dreaming all day,
But he, her pale-faced companion,
The part of Moon would play.

The lotus blossom now opens
Her chalice so tiny and pink;
Instead of his life-giving pollen,
He offers her poems to drink.

{English version by Peter Palmer, with kind permission}