Heinz Holliger

Álvaro Teixeira: Well... I heard the rehearsal and... the voice part is serialised?

Heinz Holliger: What?

AT: In the vocal part do you use a series or not?

HH: No, no... It's much stricter than a series.

AT: What?!

HH: What you heard at the end is a canon-mirror-retrograde. A quadruple canon.

AT: Um... And what is the function of the unison? There's a unison...

HH: Everything is symmetrical and the parts are always in the tritone a-flat-rel which are always unison. There can be a sense of tonal music but it's not tonal at all.

AT: But look that on Thursday and Friday the first cycle of lieds that you presented was serialised.

HH: No.

AT: No?!!!

HH: I wrote very little serialized. Sometimes just two, three bars to get the effect of a very automatic song. Sometimes I might occasionally use serialised techniques, but I practically never used the twelve-tone technique.

AT: I found big stylistic differences between your first cycle of "Lieds" and the second one.

HH: Of course, there is a 35 years gap between one and the other. The first cycle is probably my op.1

AT: Ha! So serialised!

HH: It's not serialised...

(laughs)

AT: But it sounds like it.

HH: The first cycle is closer to the expressionism of the second school of Vienna. The expression in the second cycle can be more natural. The first cycle reveals a very static form of singing, very directly expressive. In the other cycle the voice is much more integrated although the harmony is more complex. The conducting of the voice is like in Trakl's poetry, simpler and more rhythmic within the rhythm of the language.

AT: Did you work a lot with Bério?

HH: Not with Bério. We were very good friends. He dedicated the oboe sequence to me. The seventh.

AT: So you worked with him. As a musician.

HH: Yes. We did many concerts. But it was a long time ago...

AT: And with Luigi Nono?

HH: Never. I just came from conducting his Canto Sospeso at the Lucerne festival. I like it very much but this music is very far from my way of thinking. But I worked with Boulez who was my teacher for five years.

AT: And Stockausen?

HH: Not ever. My masters are Haydn, Mozart, Schumann. I am practically not influenced by contemporaries. In the 20th century Alban Berg and Bartók were important, but after the war it was Alois Bernd Zimmermann.

AT: Zimmermann has a fabulous opera...

HH: Die Soldaten. The most complex opera in the world.

AT: So Zimmermann is a reference.

HH: Yes, I feel very close to him who is a very, very great composer. I like his music very much even if I don't feel influenced by him. I feel much more influenced by the music of the past.

AT: Actually what I notice is that contemporaries in your concerts, only you... Heinz and the classics!

HH: Yes, they are my contemporaries. I have very little contact with the current production.

AT: But you were in Darmstad...

HH: Only one year.

AT: But as an instrumentist... HH: Yes but I never gave courses or attended courses. Only really as an instrumentalist in '60 and '61. AT: I see you work a lot with the soprano voice. Well... with the voices. With the voices. HH: The voice is an inexhaustible source of inspiration and I'm very attached to vocality which is a body music, almost biological. The voice is the most beautiful instrument. AT: But you compose the voice part first and do the instrumentation afterwards? HH: If you write quickly you write down mostly the voice and not much else around it. When you reread that part, everything that you had imagined comes back as if it were a re-memory. In Trakl's second cycle I concentrated mainly on the voice. But it was written in one or two days and then I did the orchestral part. Mozart only wrote the first violin and the figured bass. The rest for him was a copyist's work made from his prodigious memory. AT: Apart from Bartók and Berg who are your fundamental composers? HH: They are my spiritual guides because I was educated by Sándor Végh. I feel very close to Bartók who made a music very close to the language and the body, extremely free and rhythmically very rich. A music in fact rooted in the human body and in the earth. It's not cerebral at all. The other is Alban Berg who represents the ideal balance between sensuality, spirituality and perhaps extreme control... the almost utopian idea of anything built with such complexity that he comes almost close to the tao, to anarchy within extreme construction. There Berg goes to the Buddhic extreme of exhausting a material completely, all the way through. AT: The first cycle of lieds you played with the orchestra was composed 35 years ago? HH: 44 years ago. It was 20 years old...