LACHENMANN AND BEAUTY

It is a conventional point by now to unconsciously cite Nietzsche's idea that without the beautiful illusion of art we would die from exposure to the truth. One reason for the distaste that the intellectual classes of Germany have for the lush self-pity of Strauss's Vier Letzte Lieder is because of the wish (encoded into the wilfully retrograde technique of a work written only three years after the liberation of the death camps) that things could be as they were once, before the war. It is a beautiful piece of music of course, I don't think anyone could deny that: but it is false, a comforting and indulgently melancholy refusal to face the reality of genocide and violence. In the nineteenth century the romantics made much of an identification of truth and beauty in art: if anything, the late 20th century is dominated by a splitting apart of this identification where the truth content of art is something that makes ugliness or de-aestheticised art feel necessary. It's difficult to feel this in our bones now, in 2015 in the way I think it was sharply present after the second world war. I think it is worth remembering: arguably popular music is all about a kind of false beauty, a shiny appearance of seamlessness and a music that really responded to the broken-ness and non-reconciled nature of the world could not engage in even the partial resolution of dissonance that musical "beauty" demands. The real interest for me of Lachenmann is in his hopefuless: he is almost arguing that if we are not to fall into the seductive traps of pleasantness or prettiness, the comforting character of hedonism, then the experience of beauty should be wrested from the world as it is, made out of the wreckage of the world. His own most beautiful works (the string quartets and Staub for orchestra are my favorites) achieve something like this: a strange whisper of hope that simply because it is possible to imagine new sounds or a new situation for older sounds that there is still hope in that imagination.