Lachenmann Got Lost Music for High Soprano and Piano

duration: 28' Text: Friedrich Nietzsche and Fernando Pessoa

In “GOT LOST”, his sole composition for the traditional setting of “voice and piano”, Helmut Lachenmann combines three rather heterogeneous texts that are perhaps “god-less” but that certainly “got lost”: four rhyming lines from Friedrich Nietzsche, Fernando Pessoa’s poem “Todas as cartas de amore sao ridiculas” (All love letters are ridiculous) – and a succinct English-language note that bemoans the loss of a laundry basket, which is what actually gives the work its name.

“Three only seemingly incompatible texts, stripped of their pathos-laden, poetic and profane diction, are sent from the same sound source – a soprano voice singing ‘in whatever way’ – into a intervallically ever-changing field of sound, reverberation and movement. Calling out, playfully, ‘warbling’ and lamenting arioso: they interrupt and pervade one another, thus marking out a space that ultimately remains foreign to them, and in which – as in all my compositions – music reflects upon itself with ‘expression’-less joviality, thus showing its awareness of the transcendent, god-less message of ‘ridicolas’ that unifies these three texts.”
(Helmut Lachenmann, 2010)