The late-night Prom on August 9, presented by the London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightment, conducted by Chloe Rooke, was devoted to a single work, Songs of Wars I Have Seen by Heiner Goebbels. The work was written in 2007 for those same two groups, on commission from the Southbank Centre, for the reopening of the Royal Festival Hall after its two year-long renovation. Songs of Wars I Have Seen is based on Gertrude Stein’s book detailing her life in occupied France during World War II. The ins and outs of how Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas, two openly Jewish lesbians, survived more or less unscathed in a country controlled by Germans, where Jews were steadily being deported to concentration camps (examined in great detail by Janet Malcolm in an article in The New Yorker— https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/06/02/gertrude-steins-war) is not dealt with in Goebble’s work directly, as it isn’t in Stein’s book. Here the subject matter is the concerns of day to day existence in a war-torn environment controlled by occupiers. The part of Stein’s narrative which is used in this work is also concerned with comparisons between the current war she is living through with earlier wars she has experienced, and even more with the presentation of wars and their effects in Shakespeare’s plays, which Stein and Toklas were reading aloud with friends during that time. These two time frames are presented in musical terms: the modern day concerns are presented with, as it were, “modern” music, while the discussion of the concern of wars in Shakespeare plays are represented with music of Matthew Locke’s incidental music for Shakespeare’s The Tempest, although that music may sometimes have a sort of overlay of mechanical noises, making the immediate situation inescapable. The text is always spoken by players, usually individually, but occasionally as a group. The players of modern instruments are not separated from the players of period instruments, but there is a separation of genders. In this performance the women were on the main part of the stage, surrounded by old style standing and table top lamps, as though at home. Around the top perimeter of the stage there was a line of male musicians, playing mostly brass and percussion instruments, who didn’t speak.
The quotidian nature of life in war is set off immediately by a discourse on honey and its replacement of sugar, which quickly becomes unobtainable in conditions of war. Later in the piece meetings with strangers and the fact of the full moon and the notion of going away or being taken away and the fact of pets and children in ones household and the differences of radio announcement in the broadcasters of different countries are also discussed, but all of these details of daily life are always considered against the usually unspoken consciousness of the potentially calamitous events that could be produced at any minute by the war in progress. The shape of the work is never articulated in a dramatic way, in keeping with the overarching concern with day to day life in wartime. But the progress of the work is sure and convincing and always engaging, and one is led eventually to considering that after a war, nobody wants to eat honey because it’s too sweet. The work ends with a statement that a war is over when everybody’s had enough of it, followed by a trumpet solo over the sound of prayer bowls, which is a combination of a lament and a sad fanfare.
Songs of Wars I have seen is a very intricate and demanding work, requiring not only very expert players playing very difficult and demanding music, but very very expert sound production as well. It’s hard to imagine a better performance that the one presented here. The recording of this performance can be heard on the BBC Sounds website (https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0021k0w) for a limited time.
