Sylvano Bussotti, "Bergkristall"

Notes From Deutsche Grammophon 2531 011":



Bergkristall (for large orchestra, ballet in one act and seven scenes, concept based on the narrative of Adalbert Stifter)

I. Christmas Eve in the mountains - the children receive their presents
II. The Christmas-tree in the house of the grandparents
III. The disaster of the baker's boy
IV. Losing the path - the snowstorm
V. In the regions of eternal ice
VI. Bergkristall
VII. The mother's arms - the dawn

Sinfonieorchester deds Norddeutschen Rundfunks, Hamburg
Conductor: Giuseppe Sinopoli

Sylvano Bussotti (b. 1931): Bergkristal

SUMMARY

It is Christmas Day, and in the innumerable hamlets hidden in the high mountains there is a perpetual flow of villagers, there are dances and excited exchanges of greetings and presents just before the festival. The cobbler's children are despatched by their father on the path leading to the valley, where their grandparents live in the big dyeworks. They are to bring Christmas greetings and presents, and they receive a warm welcome from their grandmother, who has been expecting them. There is much excitement, spirits are high and Conrad's knapsack is filled with all the good things his grandmother has prepared; there is even little of the very strongest coffee to take home to mother. The children are fascinated by the glitter of the Christmas-tree, but they must be hurrying home. Night will soon be falling and the grandmother has noticed a cold shadow darkening the sky . . .

Grandfather tells them to go carefully, as the mountain can be really dangerous in some places - like the one where the little red column marks the scene of the disaster when a poor baker's boy was found frozen to death on his way with bread from one village to the next, though no one knows exactly how it happened. Conrad can just imagine it all, as grandfather tells the story - the baker's boy and his terrible fight with the cold. But he is not afraid, and never has been. On the other hand it is the memorial column, with its iron cross and naive painting, that marks the path he has to take ... The children are alone now on their homeward path, but it has already begun to snow and the woods that rise above the pathway seem never to come to an end. Gradually an impalpable wall appears to hem them in on every side and all traces of the pathway are obliterated; and it is only by instinct that Conrad guides his small sister through the snowstorm, which becomes increasingly dense and heavy. He makes a despairing effort to find the track, which has disappeared, and to his heated imagination the spirit of the baker's boy seems to be guiding them on towards the unknown... Night has completely fallen now and the cold is unbearable. Conrad takes off his waistcoat and makes Sanna put it on. But by now they do not know which direction to take; the going is increasingly steep and difficult and eventually becomes impossible. Sanna finds a frozen corner to rest in, but she is unable to go on again. And now Conrad realises that the direction in which they are heading is that of the "eternal glacier", the highest peak of all, where perhaps no one has ever been before! The sky there is so close that you can almost touch it with your fingers. And all the time the figure of the baker's boy, half fascinating and half frightening, keeps recurring to Conrad's alarmed consciousness, while above them the enormous glacier towers, like a fantastic castle of crystal.

Spirits of the sky, the wind and the night, blinding and enchanted spirits of the snows - these form the procession that accompanies the comets and unfolds the vast mantle of night from whose centre the Bergkristall spirit will issue. Conrad has given his sister some mouthfuls of the coffee which they are carrying, aware that it is absolutely essential for them to keep awake if they are not to be frozen to death. It is here that nature takes on the appearance of supernatural forms, and the boy can dance among all these spirits. Now the revelation is incarnate in the enchanting figure which combines the fascination of one of grandmother's fairy-stories and the beloved features of a mother's smile.

As soon as it grows light the spirits will vanish, each beneath its mantle of snow. It is the contemplation of that universe that has kept the children awake, and alive, all night. The village rescue team, which has managed to make its way to the summit, with its red flag fluttering, finds the children in each others' arms. Sanna is taken down in a sledge, covered with a mass of furs. Conrad knows the joy of being rescued in the warm embrace of his mother's arms. The rising sun, close above them and of giant size, burns like fire over the vast expanses of snow and the glittering quartz of the rocks, as though a mass of roses were shining, opening their buds and reflecting their own light.

(Translation: Martin Cooper)

PROGRAMME NOTE

It may seem like a fable. In spite of its three successive movements this is really and truly a symphonic poem, with a plot whose text is couched in highly unusual language. The ballet, with its minute descriptions of scene and gesture always meticulously integrated into the musical score, observes every one of the conventions which brought the form to its symbolic peak between 1890 and 1910 with the immortal works of the Russian swan, the divine Tchaikovsky. In fact it goes even further and underlines them; I feel it is absolutely essential for this ballet to be performed strictly according to the right choreographic conventions and adhering closely to the classical modes of expression. To use a comparison appropriate to the setting laid down for it, a virginal winter landscape-one is meant to be confronted with a real, icy Ballet blanc. I came across Adalbert Stifter's masterpiece as a boy, thanks to my elder brother Renzo, a painter, who had sketched fascinating pencil landscapes on the pages of our Italian translation. For more than 20 years I cherished the idea of a ballet as the perfect medium for conveying a drama of eternal innocence, and in "Bergkristall" I found the ideal opportunity. There was no getting round the chief difficulty - that of putting two children on the stage. Even the elder of the two, the boy, cannot be much more than ten years old, and he must be able to play a real protagonist's part on the stage for more than thirty minutes. Given the age of development among European dancers, such a role demands a virtuosity only found in an adult. Yet though this thorny problem could turn out to be a death-trap at the same time it provides a perfect opportunity for beginning to study the score and to see the ballet in the right light and also in the true sense, which makes art a question of accuracy in the use of shapes and language - scenic as well as musical, of course. The whole is illuminated by a quite deliberately old-fashioned light and this has nothing to do with any desire to avoid the present or, worse--refusal to believe in a more or less secure future, which would be a form of escapism. On the contrary, the present and reality take part in a scene which stands out above the orchestra, both pledged to look present-day existence in all its misery firmly in the eye. The unspoiled boy protagonist of this terrible tale loses his innocence, his untroubled childhood sleep when--in mortal danger from an imagined adversary, death, in the person of the baker's boy, who is his exact opposite--he has his first transcendent experience of nature, or as we would say, of the universe.

This awareness leads him to maturity under the spectators' very eyes. (There is also the suggestion here that a brat, who amongst other things has some of the wickedness inherent in all primitive beings, can be freed on the stage from his youthful hubris by being given a heroic part and acting bravely and victoriously in the face of a natural catastrophe). But above all he achieves this with that intact, uncorrupted sense of beauty deeply rooted in the heart of every child which makes his mother and his adored grandmother into marvels of creation, and convinces him it is perfectly natural that they can work unique miracles in the form of supernatural metamorphosis. On the stage, that miracle can, in fact, be repeated-- indeed, it is part of the very essence of the theatre, and of art itself, both vitalistic experiences which are at the same time, strictly speaking, illusory and yet tangible. Behind Stifter's invention, candid and at the same time cruel, rises the dazzling sun of Raymond Roussel, with his demand for a total transfiguration of the probable into the absolute - the pure artistic imagination, in fact. And so in the last resort the fable is wiped out - no princesses, no genii. It is natural enough, if not quite an everyday experience, that the mountain appears as a kind of enchanted castle; and the whole thoroughly credible story consists of quite precise and simple details all consistent with one another. The name "spirits" is given to all personages who are "creatures of the imagination", not simply in their relationship to the play's grammatical syntax, but in virtue of that spirit which inhabits every one of us in his first youth, providing sustenance for the growing man and gaining control over him.

I should like to reveal how this score - begun in Berlin on 15 November 1972 and finished in Rome on 31 March 1973 - in its turn represents a real and true metamorphosis of another kind, a musical one resulting from the extension of an earlier chamber-work (Nottetempo con lo scherzo e una rosa; "Night Time with a scherzo and a rose", on poems by Filippo De Pisis, 1954). The complexities of that metamorphosis will be analysed elsewhere. Here, it will be enough to say that the earlier work was also concerned with nature and the miraculous, with night and stars. Indeed, the real innermost kernel of the whole fable could be said to be precisely the birth of such a star as one sees shining on the low horizon of the proscenium curtain. As always, the shapes taken by my musical ideas led me to write for certain individual performers I had in mind. Elisabetta Terabust literally inspired the triple role of the "etoile"; the dancer Rocco, to whom the work is dedicated, took the role of Conrad, and he provided the rasison d'etre of the work. Just as children have the gift of abandoning themselves to the wonder of something to the point when it becomes reality, the dramatic and difficult music of BERGKRISTALL speaks its own precise language for those who understand the meaning of dance.

(Translation: Martin Cooper)