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Programs for the 31st concert season
(2008-2009)
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The Rheingold Curse
A Germanic Saga of Greed and Vengeance from the
Medieval Icelandic Edda
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| Theme: |
At a time when the Romans were loosing their grip on a
vast colonial empire, a wandering tribe of warlike
Germanic people from the Baltic coast came to central
Europe, finally settling on the Rhine River in 413 and
agreeing to an alliance with the Empire. But these
ambitious folk, who were called Burgundians, expanded a
little too fast and too far, and were eventually wiped out
in 436 by another tribal alliance of fighters called Huns.
The Burgundian survivors followed a long, Roman-dictated
“trail of tears” and after many years ended up in the
region we still call Burgundy today. One of their kings
was called Gundaharius: he is the man named Gunnar in our
story.
Most of early Germanic history is a collection of
fragments, hearsay, reports from homesick Romans and the
randomly scattered contents of burial mounds. The legend
of the cursed Rhinegold, of the boy-hero Sigurd, of King
Gunnar and his beautiful sister Gudrun, of Attila the Hun
and his Valkyrie-sister Brynhild, are contradictory, weird,
and seem to take place in a dreamscape which easily
includes both Mirkwood forest, the Rhine River and the
glaciers of Iceland. It is a legend based on names of
places and people (some of whom existed), freely mixed
with the old Germanic gods, cunning dwarves, dragons,
shape-changers, magical swords and horses, supernatural
beings and talking birds; an archaic story which
enthralled many generations of Europeans as they listened
to the bards and minstrels who formed the fabric of their
tribal memories. As centuries passed, the Romans went home,
Christianity was imposed, new stories were heard, and many
old orally-transmitted tales lost their immediacy or were
transformed into mere adventures until they were utterly
unrecognizable or lost. But in a far corner of Europe, in
Iceland, dozens of these stories lived on in the language
of the Vikings and - luckily for us – were copied in the
13th century into a small parchment book: a humble,
untitled manuscript which is now the greatest single
cultural treasure of the Icelanders and is called the “Edda”.
The poems found there, which serve as the basis for our
reconstructions, represent the highest art of bardic story-tellers
and singers, whose tradition stretches into the people's
remote pagan past. Their masterful style makes use of
ingenious meters, a telegraphic, pithy diction perfect for
vocalization, employing gnomic devices and poetic
circumlocutions intended more to arouse associative
imaging than to deliver information. Despite a marked
tendency towards unsentimentality, pragmatism, even grisly
humour, these Old Norse stories are full of the uncanny,
the dreamlike: the reconstructions we present here bear
witness to this. The Edda manuscript includes these tales
of envy, gold-lust, revenge and the horrible power they
have over that most sacred and holy human institution: the
family. These are the archaic stories which we have
liberated from the written page, where they were never
really at home, and put back into the mouths of bards and
the hands of minstrels.
We do not limit ourselves to this one dreadful family epic,
but frame it with a prophecy taken from the same
manuscript. The northern peoples' uncommon respect for
worlds beyond their own was manifested in a willingness to
heed what was spoken in prophetic and poetic modes.
Völuspá is the name of one of the central poems of Old
Icelandic tradition and can be translated as "the prophecy
or vision (spá) of the seeress (völva)". These are the
words of an immortal female being who speaks in the
enigmatic expressions of oracle to a questioning but
silent god Odinn; shespeaks of time's flux, of the urges
for growth and order, and the unconquerable forces of
chaos. She tells how the world came about, and she also
tells how it will end, stopping to ask her questioner: “Do
you really want to know more?”.
If this story is at all familiar to us today, it is
probably thanks to the 19th-century German Romantics’
fascination with all medieval stories and legends. We find
these Eddic poems translated into German and published (by
the Brothers Grimm!) already in 1815, and it is this
edition, among other sources, which an industrious young
composer named Richard Wagner consulted when working on
the libretto for his “Ring of the Nibelung” music drama
cycle, re-working and re-weaving a conflation of medieval
sources and his own fertile imagination, in which Brynhild
becomes Brünnhilde, Sigurd becomes Siegfried, and the
terrifying apocalyptic battle between giants and gods
becomes Götterdämmerung. But Wagner did not “rediscover”
these stories any more than we did: 800 years ago an
anonymous southern German court poet produced a hugely
successful and extravagent verse retelling of the story,
the “Nibelungenlied”; and not long thereafter the famously
literary Icelanders themselves were re-acquianted with the
whole deadly family affair through the prose "Volsunga
Saga."
Instruments: 6-string lyres by Rainer Thurau (Wiesbaden,
1997 and 2001); 4-string fiddle by Richard Earle (Basel,
2001); wooden flutes by Neidhart Bousset (Berlin,
1992-98); swan’s bone flute by Friedrich van Huene
(Boston, 1998).
Available in 2008-09.
Staged version (Ping Chong, stage director) also available.
double CD: The Rheingold Curse released on Marc Aurel
Edition (Cologne, Germany, 2002) see
www.aurel.de
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| Personnel: |
5
musicians (3 vocalists, 2 lyres, fiddle, flute,
drum) |
| Venue:
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Intimate
church or small concert hall with resonant acoustic. |
| Information & Booking: |
For artistic questions, contact Sequentia directly at:
Mailing address:
Sequentia
12, rue du Poteau
F-75018 Paris
France
European representation:
Cinquièmes Cordes
Valérie Lafont
valerie@cinquiemescordes.com
tel. +33 (0)1 40 35 71 56
42
rue des Vinaigriers
F-75010 Paris
France
All North American presenters, and those interested in the Edda music-theater production with stage director Ping Chong should contact:
Jon Aaron Concert Artists
Jon Aaron
Telephone (USA):
+1 212 665 0313
For those interested in Benjamin Bagby's performance of "Beowulf" visit the web site at: bagbybeowulf.com |
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