Aitchison: Margarete
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Shipping Policy- Composer: Jim Aitchison
- Instrumentation: Piano Quintet (Piano, Violin I, Violin II, Viola, Cello)
- Work: Margarete (2023)
- Size: 8.1 x 11.6 inches
Description
Margarete was composed after Anselm Kiefer's 1981 painting of the same name and is part of a body of Kiefer's work that refers to the complex presences of Margarete and Shulamith in Paul Celan's famous poem, Death Fugue. The viewer is presented with an edifice comprised of multiple tall frond-like structures made from straw rising from a twisted mound of the same stained black and white, with small flames set atop each, all against a textured grey background.
The music seeks out resonant correspondences, some direct, some not so. The first movement brings together idealized earthly longing embodied by seemingly endless re-configurings of the famous opening chords of Tristan and Isolde, superimposed over a substantially augmented canonic treatment of the melody from Bach's harmonization of the Christian Passiontide chorale, ‘O Sacred Head Now Wounded'. The second movement refers to another iconic artefact of German culture, Albrecht Durer's engraving, Melencolia I, specifically the so-called ‘magic square'. Musically, there are two simultaneous strands: In one, the numbers from the square are used strictly to determine nearly every parameter, and in the other they simply serve as a rough series of prompts for material created through limited chance. The third movement begins with words from the opening of Celan's poem Death Fugue transformed into a simple song without words, and in the form of a fragmented fugue. This material alternates with a crude ‘circus' dance based upon Brahms' Hungarian Dance No. 5, significantly distorted.
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Aitchison: Margarete
