How painful, how excruciatingly painful the moment that horrible voice rang out.
A voice that "screams all over the horizon", repeating a word over and over again, one, two, six times and again: the word "consistently".
A word like a guillotine.
Loud, weak, breaking off, then long and sung with endless stretching and the most intimate euphony.
Even the silence that followed was audible, and it remained audible in the large hall of the Salzburg Mozarteum for an eternal minute of silence before the conductor Maxime Pascal dropped his arms after the performance of Wolfgang Rihm's chamber opera "Jakob Lenz".
Only then a quiet, devoutly urgent applause, which was initially for the singer, whose voice for 75 minutes had made all the stations of suffering of the poet, who had lost his life, become the loudest of all: the baritone Georg Nigl.
It continued to swell as the audience, standing with cheering thanks, paid homage to the composer, who rose from his wheelchair, seated on the right-hand side of the hall.
Rihm turned seventy in March.
The festival's “Hommage Wolfgang Rihm” includes performances of his “Vigilia”, the “Cipher Cycle” and the opera about the Sturm und Drang poet Jakob Lenz.
It is a composite figure, composed of Georg Büchner's story, individual quotations from the unfortunate poet and diary entries from the pastor Oberlin, who for a time offered refuge to the suicidal man.
The thirteen scenes, arranged by the librettist Michael Fröhling like a way of the cross, do not form a linear narrative context, but rather form action spaces for sounds and images.
The intermittent fever of madness is expressed by voices from his environment that break out of the unfortunate and "tie themselves around him".
Not he alone speaks, but it speaks from him, everyone speaks from him.
As Rihm pointed out, this abysmal drama of the soul is permeated by a sound originating from far away: the combination of the (impure) tritone and a perfect fifth.
This sound is the cipher – or the thread – on which Lenz dangles.
The expressive, highly tense musical language of the work is synchronistic.
It combines elements of the Second Viennese School such as tonal sounds.
There are traditional forms such as chorale, Ländler and sarabande, as well as ironically quoted hits and illustrative sounds, when the drums make the hero's heart pound or the harpsichord "paints" the webs of thought of madness.
According to Rihm, in “Lenz” the human “turns into a fairytale, because the realism of a self-advocating, disturbed soul takes on unreal traits, or we can’t understand it any other way than not real.
A historical call rings out from every work of art.
Even operas that seem to have lifted themselves out of the depths of everyday life are like vessels that are full of hidden and often frightening truths.
Immediately after the Hamburg premiere (1979), the character of Lenz, who was made into an opera non-hero, was recognized as a type that appears "hundreds of thousands of times in the practices of psychotherapists", also an epochal type from the time of the German Autumn.
For a long time, the "chamber opera" has been on many stages, by no means only German, on the repertoire - in Salzburg for the first time in 2000, now with the young conductor Maxime Pascale and the brilliant artist collective Le Balcon and two excellent cues for the incurable poet: Damien Pass in the role of Oberlin and John Daszak, with a cutting tenor, for the merchant,
Georg Nigl, who first embodied the role in 2008 at the Wiener Festwochen in a production by Frank Castorf, then in another by Andrea Breth, has made the character of Lenz his own with heart and soul.
He merges with her without giving up and surrendering to the emotions.
In the DVD recording of Breth's much-praised production (first in Stuttgart, then in Brussels), an artist could be admired who – “I am a singer-actor” – knew how to express himself completely, apparently without restraint.
Now, in the concert performance, the tonal form of a martyr appears – as in an altarpiece.
The sounds of the voice alone create a space of experience in which the topography of a poor, tormented soul is measured.
The requirements of the game are almost limitless: from the full,
cantabile singing with a pithy, masculine sound, screaming Éclats and falsetto howling, moaning, cheering, and wailing.
It is hard to believe the energy with which Georg Nigl measured this course, which was peppered with the greatest difficulties.
The orchestra of this only supposed “chamber opera” is small: two oboes, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet and trombone, bass and snare drum, harpsichord and three cellos.
But the sound worlds it creates are larger, more dramatic and more varied than in Carl Orff's comedy of the end of the world.
Dacapo: What a painfully beautiful and unforgettable evening!