Opening Concert – In the beginning was ...

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION BY IDA HABBESTAD

Stories about the creation of the world often begin in darkness, in a void. From there, the earth is separated from the waters. – a force, a being, breathes life into the creations

The three world religions around which the festival revolves are united in the story of the beginning. Adam and Eve are the first humans in the world. They eat of the forbidden fruit and commit the first wrongdoing. Their son, Cain, amplifies this evil and takes the life of his own brother. The core challenges of being human, which we encounter whenever we are to live and function together, are established right from the very beginning.

Abraham is the patriarch in both Judaism and Islam. As populations, they have from the very beginning a half-sibling relationship, which is severely tested when extremist leaders use historical material to legitimize abuses of power. And in the midst of all this, new lives continue to arrive.

Nils Henrik Asheim’s «Genesis» explores such a coming-into-being. The festival opens in a simple tone, which slowly changes in color and texture: it gains light, it gains air, it gains rhythm. Other musical elements are added step by step, building toward a cycle that is ultimately absorbed back into the single, original tone.

In Darius Milhaud’s ballet, the world comes into being in roughly the same order as in the Christian tradition. But here the gods who create are three in number; the myth springs from African traditions. In the early 1900s, the Parisian avant-garde was fascinated by such forms of cultural expression. The shapes of African masks inspired Picasso to break with established modes of representation in painting. Jazz opened the way for Milhaud to think in new ways about rhythm and sound.

A hundred years earlier, Felix Mendelssohn was at the beginning of his career. The Octet in E-flat major is regarded as his first mature work. It still sounds youthful, melodically flowing and full of life – a manifesto of the rich possibilities of human creativity.

The Patriarchs of Music: Father Bach and Papa Haydn

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION BY IDA HABBESTAD

«A dark, resounding name» , writes the artistic director about the name Abraham. Whether he actually lived, we do not know. Scholars of our time see him just as much as a literary figure, the first life story in the Bible. Abraham personifies the relationship between God and human beings; he reveals God’s demand for obedience in an utterly immense dilemma: the command to sacrifice his own son.

In our time, the image of the father is complicated. The concept of patricide is used in Western music history as a metaphor for young composers rebelling against the previous generation in order to create something new. This program, however, does not dwell on the break, but on the inheritance. For the names Johann Sebastian Bach and Joseph Haydn also resound.

Father Bach was the head of a large and musical family. He is probably the foremost mediator of Protestantism’s view on the festival’s theme. With the Brandenburg Concertos, he refined the concerto form and created small breaks with established power structures. In the Third Concerto, the strings appear three by three in groups. The solid division between soloist and ensemble is blurred. The entire second movement is missing; we are given only a small semicolon – two chords – leading into the work’s final movement. In the Sixth Concerto, the violin is removed, creating a different hierarchy and a different sound.

Papa Haydn is the father of several large-scale forms – of the symphony and the string quartet – and in his piano trios the role of the pianist is far more soloistic than before in the tradition. The violin concerto we hear nods to a link between this evening’s patriarchs: to Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel, and to the Classical clarity he believed was yet to come. A reminder, perhaps, or a hope, when faced with the grand narratives of world history that can seem unchangeable, that something new may also grow in the cracks of the foundations.

Dervish

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION BY IDA HABBESTAD

For the love of this person there is no description

other than to say the same thing, that it comes. (...)

I dance, for from his difficult words

a hundred meanings come to each person.

Jalal al-Din Rumi’s 13th-century verses do not point toward a fixed, frozen text, but toward experience. In the rituals of the mystics, more than words alone are allowed to carry meaning. In dhikr, breath and sounds are repeated, the movement is circular, and a rhythmic insistence arises that takes over from thought. This embodiment of faith has often been mistrusted by those in power; what cannot be controlled through speech is perceived as dangerous.

When Béla Bartók made the first recording of such a dhikr al-hadra in Cairo in 1932, he captured not only a sound, but also a social and ritual practice. As a musical archaeologist, Bartók was not in search of exotic motifs for ornamentation; he sought underlying structures and linked the Hungarian countryside to the plains of Anatolia. His «Arabic Song» for two violins is an attempt to translate something unpolished into the stricter format of the score.

The traditions of the people can be read as a contrast to the bourgeois. Both Franz Liszt and Pablo de Sarasate cultivated the idea of «the free» and believed they found it in the expression of Romani musicians; in this concert they share the theme that Sarasate immortalised in Zigeunerweisen. Although Bartók would later correct Liszt’s notion of what constitutes “authentic” Hungarian music, he celebrated his predecessor’s artistic radicalism – the desire to step outside the rigid forms of the times.

In Johannes Brahms, too, one can find the friction between the polished and the more raw. In the second movement of the Clarinet Quintet, the singable outer sections are interrupted by a middle section in style hongrois; for a moment, Brahms allows the music to lose its sense of direction.

When Trygve Seim today sets Rumi’s poems to music, he continues such a conversation: between historical material, between improvised and composed elements, and an exploration of how breath and rhythm can still open spaces within us.

Conversion

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION BY IDA HABBESTAD

In Wergeland’s collection «The Jew» (1842), a mullah, a rabbi, and a Christian priest meet. They seek shelter by the same oasis, converse through the night, and at sunrise they praise their respective Gods, all on an equal footing. In this way, Wergeland insists on the equality of all people and of their faiths.

Wergeland’s text was an intervention on behalf of the rights of Jews in Norway. For the Jewish Felix Mendelssohn, Christian baptism may have served as a strategic protection, but in his music his faith is more structural than calculated. Mendelssohn taught the world to listen to Bach anew, but first he himself attended the school of counterpoint. When the chorale «Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ» pushes its way through a restless web of harmony in the final movement of the Piano Trio (1845), it functions not as an external quotation, but as an inner credo.

Changing religion can be a radical shift. When Sarah Levett met Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, she was persuaded and turned away from her Jewish origins. The year before, she had married Johan Svendsen, who during this period orchestrated Schumann’s «Abendlied». Their marriage became turbulent. It is said that Bergljot inspired Ibsen’s «Hedda Gabler» – a woman out of step with her own interior and imprisoned by the expectations of others. Svendsen’s lyrical intimacy in the violin Romance can be heard against the backdrop of such personal upheaval.

Wagner himself sought a different kind of transcendence. The «Wesendonck Lieder» contain Christian imagery, but also a pull toward Eastern philosophy. He no longer sought a return home to the tonic, but created a chromatic exhalation as the colour of unfulfilled earthly desire, resolved only in longing and in death.

We do not know for certain why human beings seek something greater than themselves. The movement may perhaps have no full stop. But Wergeland’s words can offer a foundation: «Every religion has a gentle and loving heart».

A la Turca

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Far in the southeast of Turkey lies the city of Urfa (now Şanlıurfa), where it is believed that Abraham was born. He spent much of his life on the move, as a nomad or pilgrim, travelling from Ur in Mesopotamia to Egypt and to Canaan. With the Egyptian slave woman Hagar he had his first child, and in the Islamic account he leaves her and Ishmael in the desert, at the place that is now Mecca.

At the far northwestern edge of Turkey lies the city of Istanbul. Constantinople was the former name of the city; in the Nordic countries, it was called Miklagard. For both Christians and Muslims, the city has been the heart of the world. Constantinople was the centre of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine traditions, until the Turkish sultan Mehmet conquered it in 1453. Byzantine scholars sought refuge, bringing ancient Greek texts with them to Italy, thereby laying the foundations for the emergence of the Renaissance.

The ideas behind the Turkish military bands in Mozart’s «Rondo alla Turca», or the sensuality in Grieg’s «Anitra’s Dance», bear witness to a strong cultural fascination. At the same time, the works are, each in their own era, examples of a Western gaze that sees the Orient as a barbaric, seductive «other».

When Fazıl Say creates his own version of Mozart’s rondo, he takes the idea back, in a sense. Yet he does not point toward his Turkish origins, but instead distils and intensifies the improvisatory character of the piece.

Music history is otherwise full of borrows. Grieg uses Mozart’s sonatas in their entirety, but dresses them in his own Romantic garb by adding an extra part. In the Cello Concerto, Grieg borrows only from himself. Among other things, a march of homage from the incidental music to «Sigurd Jorsalfar» is quoted. Norway’s king in the 12th century travelled on crusade to Jerusalem and to Miklagard, where he fought against Muslims. And in Constantinople’s central sanctuary, Hagia Sophia, Sigurd carved his own name.

A Thousand and One Nights

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It begins with the voice. In the dark, where death awaits at daybreak, Schéhérazade survives through creativity and words. For a thousand nights she whispers resistance to the violence of the patriarchy. With quiet perseverance she nurtures the belief that language can shift the world.

Johann Strauss II places the fable within the forms of the Viennese waltz. In«Tausend und eine Nacht», the dream of the Orient becomes a shimmering, frictionless flight of fancy. The aesthetics mirror the escapism of 1870s Vienna, where art replaces political power: the bourgeoisie, having lost political room for manoeuvre to the aristocracy, chose aesthetic expressions rather than confrontational ones.

For Maurice Ravel, the foreign is not a backdrop but a state of being. Around Tristan Klingsor’s universe, the structure is created by moods and richly coloured surfaces rather than by repetition. In the opening song «Asie», the music swells across the sea while the protagonist conjures the world into her own room. She speaks of all that she desires – of purple sails, of unknown faces, of deep forests. The music becomes her ship, and the words a map of inner and outer landscapes.

Cultural exchange also shapes the Iberian Peninsula, which embraces Christian, Muslim, and Jewish thought. In Manuel de Falla’s Spanish songs, Moorish ornamentation and echoes of Sephardic melancholy are given a modern, rhythmic pulse.

Back in the dark, the veil of fable has been removed. The white moonlight shines on a human crisis in Arnold Schönberg’sVerklärte Nacht. Two lovers wander through the forest, weighed down by the woman’s confession: she longed for a child and gave herself to a stranger before she met her true beloved. The air is full of anxiety, until the man replies that love will transform the child.As with Schéhérazade, it is language – here, musical language – and love that hold the power to shift the world.

Ashkenaz and Kabbala

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION BY IDA HABBESTAD

There is a gravity in Jewish mysticism, shaped by the journey from Palestine to the Rhine Valley and Provence. In the 12th century, the world seemed more open. Jewish mystics borrowed from Sufi practices. With the Almohad Caliphate’s invasion in 1148, the cultural space was closed, and Jewish thinkers were forced northward.

When an outer world collapses, thought is forced inward. In the German lands, Ashkenazi Jews sought protection from demonic forces in a strict and ascetic ethic. Further south, Kabbalists explored creation, mapping the divine and the hidden codes behind the biblical texts’ literal meaning.

The ambiguity of Jewish experience resonates in Sergei Prokofiev’s 1919 overture. The clarinet laments loss, yet is at the same time in festive mood. The music refuses to choose between sorrow and joy; it contains both.

In Dmitri Shostakovich, the use of Jewish motives becomes an audible force of resistance. Fragile, brutal, and laid bare, Piano Trio No. 2 was composed in 1944, when the extent of the Holocaust became known. The finale summons an inexorable dance of death, a music that does not turn away, but insists on remaining within the pain. The romance about Gamajun is drawn from Slavic mythology. The prophetic bird bears a similar message: a warning of war, of famine, and of the executioner’s presence.

In Lurianic Kabbalah, human beings are asked to gather the sparks from the light that was scattered at creation. Osvaldo Golijov’s work about Isaac’s dreams builds a bridge from the 12th century to the present day. He lets the clarinettist seek foothold in layers of time and language – Aramaic, Yiddish, and Hebrew. The blind Isaac speaks from a physical darkness about the universe as waves of divine light. From a people who have been severely tried there may also arise a desire, tikkun olam, to repair the world. The belief that our actions can heal the cosmos gives hope that the world may one day be reconciled.

Finale – Das Judenthum in der Musik

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Wagner’s description of the Jew is painful to approach. «Das Judentum in der Musik» speaks of an «instinctive aversion» to the Jewish personality; an art that is competent, but soulless. Karl Blessinger’s later, atrocious writings about Mahler drew nourishment from these ideas: the path can be short from aesthetic judgment to political exclusion.

At the centre of all this stands Wagner himself. The «Siegfried Idyll» is music of unimaginable tenderness, written for his wife Cosima after the birth of their son. That the same artist could contain such love and such dark rhetoric remains a challenging paradox in our culture.

In response to Wagner’s wish for banishment, we hear here the voices he wanted to erase. Ernest Bloch’s «From Jewish Life» carries within it the song of the synagogue. The sound of the cello is raw and exposed – a cry for dignity in a Europe where darkness has once again descended upon Jewish life.

In Mahler, we hear loneliness as a state of being. He converted in order to retain his place in Vienna’s musical life, but in «Ich bin der Welt» In Mahler, we hear loneliness as a state of being. He converted in order to retain his place in Vienna’s musical life, but in the music it is the self’s withdrawal that prevails; the right to an inner space, far from society’s power to define.

In Mendelssohns Piano trio …is perhaps the source of Wagner’s envy: a technical and melodic assurance. Behind the glittering surface lies a romantic restlessness, a deep substance that bursts through Wagner’s narrow categories.

This year’s festival has looked to Abraham – forefather of Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. In Wergeland’s «The three , scholars from each tradition meet for conversation. At sunrise they are about to burst into songs of praise, but fall silent for fear of offending the others. When the birds sing, each with its own beak, they understand: truth must be allowed to sound in its own distinctiveness. As friends they each go their own way, but pause in shared wonder: were the birds angels sent to look upon our human frailty? They dwell on the thought for a moment – then they move on.