Sounding transience

Wherever you look in the 54 short chapters of Music and farewellyou will make discoveries at every turn that will amaze you, enlighten you, confirm your own knowledge or even provoke contradiction. This is not a comfortable topic, because in music, farewell means above all death - and this is present in the most diverse works of music history. Peter Gülke, who as a conductor, musicologist and teacher has commented on works as a whole in numerous publications, also surveys the development from the Middle Ages to the present day from this particular perspective, brings the examples together with such aplomb and interprets them so clearly, often with cross-references to literary works, that one is immediately eager to listen to the passages. In many cases, however, the scores or piano reductions (including choral scores) are indispensable.

This makes it clear that the texts are aimed more at "insiders", as it is often harmonic developments or motivic connections that are not obvious that provide the key to understanding. The chapter "Transcended C major" in Gluck, Haydn or Beethoven can help to shed light on the subject. Works from Du Fay to Kurtág are examined from the same perspective in "Commemorating the dead among musicians" or, even more unsparingly, Gesualdo, Froberger and Shostakovich in the chapter "Music for one's own death".

In just a few sentences, Gülke succeeds in linking Shostakovich's eighth string quartet with his first and fifth symphonies, for example, and also with the d-flat-c-b motif, or in ironically anticipating expectation with an apt choice of titles: "Land, das ferne leuchtet - Fahrkarten nach Orplid" or "Tod mit und ohne Verklärung". The parallel setting of Ferdinand Hodler and Leoš Janáček in chapter 47, entitled "Death Protocols", is completely surprising when he describes Hodler's cycle of paintings of his dying partner Valentine and Janáček's speech melody notations of articulations by his dying daughter Olga - disrespectfully, but after surviving the shock, accepted on examination as exactly correct - as the results of "creative voraciousness". On the other hand, he describes Mahler's last Adagio and sketches for the tenth symphony with the most discreet indulgence under the aspect of "parallelism of music and life"; the description with the "eerily grandiose border crossing of this music" makes it impossible to pass over it without hearing bars 184 to 212 of the Adagio in the sound sample.

Gülke's formulations are sophisticated, his explanations are rich in German, Latin and French quotations, his comparisons demand a great deal of general knowledge, and it is not always possible to follow his train of thought straight away. But only in a few cases can one get the impression that the language is unnecessarily complex in relation to the topic - Adorno's writing still shines through from time to time: "Incidentally, the carefully maintained incoherence forms the structural antithesis to the almost chorale-like complexity of 'Transfiguration', into which the not exactly moribund impetus of the play saves itself."

The detailed reflections on death (also set off from the text), which are inserted between groups of chapters as "Selbstgespräche I-V", are movingly direct and very personal - completely unusual in a specialist book on musical conclusions: thought-heavy sections on the illness and death of his wife, with whom he was associated for almost 60 years; but not only this, but also wider-ranging reflections on letting go and being alone, which often intertwine with the music again, so that the technically discussed music moves closer to the author's own understanding of death as he continues reading and can have a subcutaneous effect.

Peter Gülke, Musik und Abschied, 362 p., with sheet music and index of persons and works, € 29.95, Bärenreiter/Metzler, Kassel/Stuttgart 2015, ISBN 978-3-7618-2377-4, also available as an e-book