Christian Ofenbauer

Christian Ofenbauer's early oeuvre explored the fragmentary, the sudden leap into contrast – on the basis of a dramatic-expressive conception of music: a truly unrestrained, agitated will for expression seemed to be the motor of enormous, violent sound forces which harshly collided without mediation; made structures explode and each forced sharp edges into the flesh of the other sphere. Sometimes rashly and simplistically misunderstood as romanticisms, the roots, the words of this language (even if formulated in the grammar of the late 20th century) are primarily fuelled by the sphere of the Viennese School – an influential, important shadow from the past which had to be recognised and assimilated by Ofenbauer out of artistic necessity: not least importantly in his instrumentation of Alban Berg's piano sonata op. 1 (1984), but also, on a larger scale, in the Mahler homage ...wie eine nachtmusik (1986). The central focus of these years is his seven-part opera Medea after Heiner Müller: written between 1990 and 94 in almost monomaniac seclusion, it is the centrepiece of an aesthetic system of reference to which Greek mythology (always an important source for Ofenbauer) adds a further dimension. In its immediate vicinity can be found, for example, the two versions of BruchStück 4 – MEDEAKOMMENTAR (1992) which quote from the fourth scene of the opera, or the ARGONAUTENSTUDIE (Studio per un Argonauta) for prepared double-bass (1993). Thus, a familiar musical language had long since developed, a characteristic idiom in which Christian Ofenbauer could easily have remained. But the composer did not choose the easy way and decided consciously against this safe and comfortable path: to discard a self-created instrument in the very moment in which it begins to acquire real practicability – that was exactly the self-chastisement and -stimulation which Ofenbauer was prepared to take as an artistic guideline.

A one-year creative rest was indispensable to gain the necessary inner distance from what he had "experienced, endured and conquered" (Ofenbauer); and to conceive new worlds of sound. As radically reduced as unordentliche inseln/de la motte fouqué-vertonung must have seemed in 1995 – today the work emerges merely as the beginning of a transitional period which is as impressive as it was lasting in effect, and from which also emerged the related works BruchStück 5 for ensemble and DER ENGEL IST GESCHLACHTET (a mezzo-soprano contributes a poem by Andrea Gerk) as well as the two versions of the "shadow study in pp", the KLAVIERSTÜCK 1995 (BruchStück 6) and BruchStück 6 for large orchestra. Christian Ofenbauer fully entered the new phase of his artistic development with the enigmatic, transfigured whispering of eight electronically manipulated female voices in KLAGE DER PERSEPHONE BIN ICH: SIRENE (1995) and with the ZWEI STÜCKE für 8 Flöten (1996) with their many-coloured, sometimes mildly irritated web structures. The monumental-fragmentary shocks of his earlier style are now replaced by continuous developments which almost appear as in slow motion: the aesthetics of Morton Feldman have audibly become an important point of reference in Ofenbauer's work. The concert piece fancies (fancy-papers) for violin and orchestra, for example, subtly changes its acoustic state during a half-hour. But this is not all – each work also deals with a whole array of compositional themes and problems: the one and a-half minutes of the first of the two FRANKFURT PRÉLUDES prefigures in extreme condensation and layer-work the 50-minute course of the second, which, by the seating of the orchestra, diagonally parts the auditorium in two halves; the motet KOMMT SIRENEN KLAGT is not only an acoustic conflation, but deals also with the challenge of letting harmony return as an integral parameter into New Music. A further element of his later style is also Ofenbauer's turning away from any "espressivo" character whatsoever, which element is relinquished in favour of the central interest in the cool "ur"-crystal of vibrato-less, "objective" sound: radically purged from all emotive ballast and from emotional coercion, music is as far as possible reduced to itself. An exemplary focusing of all these thematic strands can be seen in Ofenbauer's music-theatre SzenePenthesileaEinTraum (1999/2000), the libretto of which was written after Heinrich von Kleist's tragedy by Ofenbauer himself (under collaboration of Lutz Graf, the director of the first performance), as an "interplay between violence and sexuality", which evolves around Penthesilea and Achilles.

"Parts of the material are shown several times in sequence, but not always completely and always with different music. These scenes are composed so that it seems as if they were broken off by the singers themselves. The goal is the dangerous moment of a-synchronism between stage, characters and the ensemble of musicians." (Christian Ofenbauer)

His most recent work, ZERSTÖRUNG DES ZIMMERS/DER ZEIT (2000), simultaneously juxtaposes two extremely soft, substantial and entirely dissimilar strata of sound: dripping piano sounds and a dense band of sound from the string quartet explode the proportion of space and time which, after Kant, lies at the bottom of every perception – Christian Ofenbauer still explores the unheard-of.

Walter Weidringer