Schwarz auf Weiß
2. July 2006, Münchner Merkur
Vielsinnliche Sphären
Festspiel+: Heiner Goebbels' brillantes "Schwarz auf Weiß"
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"Wenn ich nicht irre, so äußerte sich der seltsame Geist der Gestirne nicht nur im physischen Lauf der Erde, sondern in der Seele, der Vorstellungs- und Gedankenwelt der Menschen", schreibt Edgar Allan Poe 1850 in seiner Schauerparabel "Schatten". 1996 greift der Komponist und Regisseur Heiner Goebbels diese Kurzgeschichte sowie Texte von Maurice Blanchot und Heiner Müller für das TAT Frankfurt auf und schafft, gemeinsam mit 18 Musikern des Ensemble Modern, eben dies: eine seltsame Sphäre für die Vorstellungs- und Gedankenwelt seines Publikums, ein vielstimmiges Musiker-Theater mit weit ins Vielsinnliche verschobenen Grenzen, "Schwarz auf Weiß". So auch beim Gastspiel im Münchner Prinzregententheater (Festspiel+, musica viva).
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Das Ballspiel mit verstärkten Schlägern, das Kegelspiel mit Posaunendämpfern - alles wird zum rhythmischen Spuk. Manchmal sogar zum stummen Ritual, das über die Musikalität seiner Theatralität staunt. Es herrscht ein atemberaubend geordnetes Chaos zwischen den dreißig schwarzen Bänken, das dem Zuschauer meist den Rücken und stattdessen einem Schattenspieltor mit Papiersegeln sein Gesicht zuwendet. Metaphorisch eng an Poes Text gelehnt, lässt der Schatten auch auf Goebbels' Bühne irgendwann seine Verhüllung fallen, die Segel sinken und das geisterhafte Gegenüber zeigt sich im eindrucksvollen Gegenlicht. Und wenn zum Finale eine Sirenenkurbel wehmütig die japanische Koto-Zither bespielt - wen wundert es, dass Goebbels da auch noch den Preis zum Welttheatertag 2006 erhält.
Teresa Grenzmann
3. September 2001, Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
Schrille Gespenstersonate in Bochums Jahrhunderthalle
Heiner Goebbels' "Schwarz auf Weiß" stürmisch gefeiert
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Wenn musikalischer Anspruch und Publikums-Zuspruch sich so glücklich treffen wie jetzt in Bochums Jahrhunderthalle, könnten die Vorzeichen für künftige Projekte schlechter sein. Heiner Goebbels dichte Raum-Komposition "Schwarz auf Weiß" tourt seit 1996 als mitreißendes Stück Musik-Theater, das an jedem Spielort neu entsteht. Neu, weil es im theatralischen Experiment jedem Raum individuellen Reiz abgewinnt.
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Goebbels' Musik zeichnet eine enorme klangsprachliche Vielfalt aus. Seine Komposition grenzt nicht aus, sie umarmt den Jazz, sie gibt der Elektronik (mitunter ironisch) Platz und zeigt sich bis zur Filmmusik-Hommage zitierfreudig.
So reißt der Abend hier als schrille Gespenstersonate im Dickicht vorbeipreschender Städte-Projektionen mit, dort hetzt er brachiale Blechbläser aufs kammermusikalische Idyll. Das "Ensemble Modem" folgt dem Wirbel der Klänge und Bilder perfekt. Wo sieht man das auf solchem Niveau?
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Wenig an diesem geleiertem Abend katzbuckelt vor akademischem Ernst, der Neue Musik so oft umgibt; noch weniger freilich gibt man oberflächlich dem Entertainment Zucker. Ein Kunst-Stück, nicht weniger.
Lars L. von der Gönna
16. August 2001, Chelsea Clinton News
Black on White' Proves Great Fun to Hear
Lincoln Center Festival Provides Masterpiece of Madness
In the vertigo inducing auditorium of the La Guardia High School for the Performing Arts, the recent Lincoln Center Festival 2001 presented several performances of the most provocative of all its premieres - "Black on White," a musical theater whatchamacallit for 17 players by German composer Heiner Goebbels (and please, there's no relation). Goebbels has created all by himself a dazzling fresco of sheer nonsense, as impossible for mere mortal man to explain what might have occurred before the "Big Bang" or death itself.
Epic though this may sound, "Black on White" is great to watch and hear. The music is a delightful amalgam of the avant-garde and the devant-garde, with much of the center section reminding us of the latter-day Big Band sounds of the 1950s (Sauter-Finegan Lives!), and much of the chamber orchestration is spotlighted by the contrabass clarinet - probably the most cumbersome wind instrument yet conceived and one which film composer Bernard Herrmann consistently called upon to Sonically illustrate some of Ray Harryhausen's "Dynamation" monsters. The staging is similarly holographic, baffling in its three-dimensional effects and enchanting evocations of Japanese No plays, and The Ensemble Modern and everyone else performed their duties presumably definitively.
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For myself, I still have no idea of what this masterpiece of madness is all about, but I had one hell of a good time, and, frankly, 1 don't give a damn. I'd just love to experience it again.
Bill Zakariasen
6. August 2001, Sequenza/21
Goebbels' Black on White
Re-Defines Music Theatre
The U.S. premiere of Heiner Goebbels' Black on White (Schwarz auf Weiss) is a memory that hovers on a lofty plain far above that of most other recent music events. Clearly, the work is a major achievement for Goebbels and Ensemble Modern, for whom it was written, and a quantum leap for musical theater. There is so much one could say about this work but at the same time I found it difficult to write about.
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But, perhaps, the most striking things about this piece is that it re-examines and re-invents musical theater. I expected to see musical theater in the sense that the orchestra plays somewhere off in the background or down in a pit and the action, provided by the actors, would happen on stage. That notion and stereotype vanished quickly.
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The stage is set. The music and the action begin. The scene before us seems a little hard-edged and has a pervading anonymity and regimentation to it. The lighting is at once stark and diffused. People, the actors-musicians, come and go, they sit, they get up, they walk and run around and they are also playing the music. They group, they re-group they are sitting alone at times. At once they play and they act and are the movement to the score.
I was struck by how good the production sounded. In fact, the sound got an A plus in my book and it was staged in a high school auditorium; a nice one, but not really a concert hall with balanced acoustics and all that. And you have to appreciate that every instrument not only was individually milked and amplified but it was all done via a wireless system. No wires and such because the musicians/actors and the set had to move un-tethered. And they all did. They moved, they played, they provided the drama and the music.
The score is well-conceived and masterfully performed by the ensemble and much like the set, is striking in the way it evokes a quality of pathos, edginess and mystery.
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When Black on White made its London premiere in 1997, a music critic for The Times wrote: "Sometimes, alas too rarely, a critic stumbles across a new work that is so ingeniously conceived, so mesmerising, so far ahead of the rest of the field, that the only immediate response is a dropped jaw, a dazed grin and a gulped croak of 'bravo'."
Four years down the road, Black on White has lost nothing of its power to dazzle, amaze and inspire awe. If you ever have the chance to see this remarkable work, don't miss it. It is a masterpiece.
Duane Harper Grant
2001/08, andante.com
Black on White
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The true "star" of Black on White is the Ensemble Modern. They were involved in the creation of this piece, and it shows in things aside from their musicianship such as oboist Catherine Milliken's ferocious, sexy delivery of T. S. Eliot and violist Susan Knight's impressive throwing arm. Though not an overt political statement, composing this piece for a collective (Ensemble Modern is a truly democratic organization, without an artistic director) reflects the composer's politically active past, adding an autobiographical edge.
If there is a proscribed way an artist ought to behave in the 21st century, Heiner Goebbels has captured it. Unlike much avant-twaddle, Black on White is a whole piece of music which comes alive in performance, rather than an unsatisfying performance-art piece which wears its own incomprehensibility like a badge of honor! Getting the musicians out of their chairs is not a new idea (Haydn's "Farewell" Symphony is an early precursor), but to do something like this and have it not come off as a rough-hewn free-for-all is nothing short of wizardry'. With Black on White, Heiner Goebbels is the wizard behind the curtain - and we should pay attention.
Daniel Felsenfeld
1. August 2001, Wall Street Journal
Black on White
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The players of Frankfurt's Ensemble Modern had to navigate a stage filled with lines of benches and play complex musical motifs in different configurations and facing in different directions, often without a conductor. A piccolo player performed a duet with a two-note whistling teakettle. Some players spoke, solo and in unison; some set up ladders. At one point, the entire ensemble -string players included- picked up brass instruments and turned into a band that appeared to be menacing a lone player of the zitherlike Japanese koto. The proscenium arch crashed forward on top of them, not once but twice.
No doubt the images of death evoked in the reading of Edgar Allan Poe's "Shadow" (in German, on tape) were meant to tell us what it was all about, but the effect was obvious and, finally, pretentious. However, the bits of music, ranging from jazz-influenced brass riffs and organ solos suitable for horror movies to a string-orchestra lament, were a tantalizing glimpse of Mr. Goebbels's considerable compositional gifts, to say nothing of the talents of the Ensemble Modern.
30. July 2001, The New Yorker
Black and White Night
As the lights go up on "Black on White," Heiner Goebbels's music-theatre piece premiering at the Lincoln Center Festival this week, a man sits scribbling at a desk. The stage begins to fill with musicians, who play checkers on a harpsichord lid or throw tennis balls at a bass drum, when they're not reading lines from Poe and Eliot or laying down bursts of atonal jazz. Goebbels, a forty-nine-year-old composer, has broken away from the grim Expressionism of his German heritage using a polyglot musical style-rock beats, Baroque arpeggios, and grungy minimalist funeral chants-to create a playful, striking work about perennially confounding subjects such as death and art.
28. July 2001, The Star-Ledger
Delightful melange of motion and music
Heiner Goebbels makes reinventing the wheel seem such fun
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Few contemporary ensembles, which by their nature are inclined to experiment, could have come across so effectively as both abstract musicians and onstage personalities. The group's razor-sharp intonation, rhythmic acuity and interconnection resulted in a whimsical, high-toned premiere.
With endlessly imaginative stagecraft that peaks and flows with wild fantasy and comes clearly into focus with clever use of props, Goebbels converts the chaos of 17 people on stage into a delightful, high-peaking symphony of motion and sound.
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Willia J. Conrad
28. July 2001, Newsday
A Symphonic Work in Jazzy Perpetual Motion
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"Black on White," a masterful if sometimes frustrating concoction of chaos and discipline, was built around the astonishingly flexible Ensemble Modern, whose members play in constant motion. They wind through a stage full of debris, set up a triumphant arch made of ladders, take up their horns and march in formation across a phalanx of benches. When a proscenium arch is sent keeling to the ground, nobody flinches.
The backbone of this motley score is jazz, all kinds of jazz: the jagged, glassy rhythms of be-bop, the baroque frenzy of Ornette Coleman, the stately quiver of a New Orleans funeral. But Goebbels drapes a great many other sources on that solid frame. In one especially haunting episode, the plaintive sound of a Jewish cantor recorded in the 1920s floats above an accompaniment of hard-edged chords.
While the music lurches onward, the Modern's members pursue a series of meticulously loopy routines. Musicians lob tennis balls across the stage at a thunder sheet and a bass drum, producing a violent rumble or a mellow thud on the rare occasions that they hit their mark. A dulcimer player laboriously sets up her instrument to a stammering electronic drone. A man boils water on a Bunsen burner, then takes up his piccolo and plays a duet with the tea kettle's harmonized whistle.
Life is like that. We carry out our private, obsessive little rituals, tuning out the thrum of the world, and then we go out and merge with the bustling public.
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"Black on White" hovers between the pretentious and the comic, veering at times into wordy murk, and at others alighting in slapstick. It's a dark work, full of morbid allusions and hints of fear, but, like a traditional New Orleans funeral, it is also full of explosive joy.
Justin Davidson
27. July 2001, The New York Times
An Ensemble So Flexible It Just About Morphs
It wasn't so long ago that composers described as eclectic might be expected to weave their works with threads of Romanticism and Classicism., Serial techniques and stretches of Minimalist texture, and perhaps occasional strands of jazz or pop. But eclecticism of that sort generally made a point of staying within shouting distance of the traditional art music mainstream, and it can seem peculiarly narrow beside the omnivorous eclecticism of the German composer Heiner Goebbels.
Mr. Goebbels's "Black on White" (1996), which had its United States premiere on Wednesday evening at the La Guardia Concert Hall as part of the Lincoln Center Festival 2001, touches on just about everything in the course of its 80 minutes.
It is, for one thing, a concert piece that, in purely musical terms, demands much of its performers. Most of the 17 members of Ensemble Modern, the extraordinarily flexible German group for which the work was composed, have either an extended solo turn or exposed, unusually articulated lines within the ensemble texture.
The players are also asked to take up several instruments. Although the group, as normally constituted, includes strings, winds, brass, keyboards and percussion, the players coalesce at various points as a brass band, a string orchestra and a choir. They comply with remarkable agility.
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The music is equally kinetic, and creates the illusion of driving the action on the stage, although both sound and vision are entirely abstract. Along the way, the score takes in various flavors of jazz, including a late-Coltrane-style saxophone solo, passing glances at Stravinskyan string figures, recorded cantonal music, a fragment of a countertenor aria, koto music in a traditional style and the full catalog of avant-garde chamber music moves, from abrasive to amusing.
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Allan Kozinn
8. June 2001, Schwarzwälder Bote
Blick ins Schattenreich
Ensemble Modern spielt Heiner Goebbels "Schwarz auf Weiss"
Ein hessischer Abend bei den Pfingstfestspielen im Festspielhaus? Auf den ersten Blick - ja. Das Ensemble Modern kommt aus Frankfurt und Heiner Goebbels, der Komponist des Musiktheaters "Schwarz auf Weiss" ebenso. Was dann folgte war ein "Weltabend". Beider Namen gehört in der Szene der Musik der Moderne zum allerfeinsten. Die Bühnen der Welt stehen ihnen offen.
"Schwarz auf Weiss" wird auf der Bühne vom Ensemble musikalisch und szenisch gespielt. Der Musiker der Zukunft wird kreativer sein müssen als jetzt noch. Diese Kreativität lebt das Frankfurter Ensemble beispielhaft vor. Goebbels bewegt sich bei der Partitur für sein Musiktheater nicht im eng geschnürten klassischen Mieder des Traditionsbewussten. Auf der Bühne erklingt ein Mix aus klassischen, fernöstlichen, jazzigen, poppigen und Weltmusikklängen. Dazwischen sind Texte eingeschoben [...] vor allem vom verstorbenen Dramatiker Heiner Müller.
Alles dreht sich um den Übergang vom irdischen Durcheinander zur sakralen Wirklichkeit - vom Leben zum Tod. [...] "Schwarz auf Weiss" lädt zum Überlegen ein.
Andreas Schön
6. June 2001, Die Rheinpfalz
Muntere Anarchie
Goebbels "Schwarz auf Weiss" in Baden-Baden
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Goebbels versieht die schaurigen Texte gerne mit einer ironischen Brechung, während in Poes Erzählung "Schatten" von unheimlichen Ereignissen im antiken Ptolemais die Rede ist, kocht sich einer der Musiker gemütlich seinen Tee.
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Eine phänomenale Vielseitigkeit legt das Ensemble Modern in "Schwarz auf Weiss" an den Tag. Nicht nur, dass jeder virtuos sein eigenes Instrument beherrscht, beherzt greifen die Streicher auch mal zum Blech und die Bläser umgekehrt zur Geige. Letzteres allerdings nur, um ein dekoratives Violinenballett auszuführen, derweil eine sinnreiche Konstruktion der chinesischen Zither mechanisch eine aparte Tonfolge entlockt. Elegant hat Goebbels moderne elektronische Rhythmen mit den Motivfetzen und improvisatorischen Soli der Musiker zu einer Einheit verbunden. Trotz aller abrupten Brüche reißt der rote Faden in "Schwarz auf Weiss" nie ab. Dieses Musiktheater ist zu quirlig, um ein Requiem für den Dramatiker Heiner Müller abzugeben, doch eine Hommage auf den -großen Autor ist es allemal, wenn am Ende aus dem Off Müllers Stimme spricht. Ungewöhnlich, dank der hoch professionellen Interpretation des Ensemble Modern auch spannend, erwies sich "Schwarz auf Weiss" als zeitgenössischer Kontrapunkt der Pfingstfestspiele.
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