Jörg Widmann was born in Munich in June 1973. He studied clarinet at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich with Gerd Starke and later with Charles Neidich at The Juilliard School. He began to take composition lessons with Kay Westermann at the age of 11 and subsequently continued his studies with Wilfried Hiller, Hans Werner Henze, and later Heiner Goebbels and Wolfgang Rihm. His Con brio, an homage to Beethoven, has been performed by more than 60 conductors and is one of Widmann’s most popular orchestral works.
Widmann often composes works in groups that explore a sustained musical idea, ranging from classical formal structures to spatial music environments. He has written five string quartets that are intended as a large cycle, with each individual work following a traditional movement form. He composed a trilogy of works for large orchestra—Lied, Chor, and Messe—that transform vocal genres into instrumental works. A second trilogy comprises Labyrinth, Zweites Labyrinth, and Drittes Labyrinth, and creates the experience of losing and seeking orientation in space. He has composed three major works for the stage—the opera Das Gesicht im Spiegel, the multimedia collaboration Am Anfang, and the reinterpretation of biblical myth Babylon—as well as one large-scale oratorio, Arche.
The ensemble piece … umdüstert … was composed around the same time as my cello concerto Dunkle Saiten. It is based on a comment on the subject of beauty made by Baudelaire: “On one of the most interesting objects which human society has to offer,” the face of a woman, is at its most fascinating and attractive “when darkened by melancholy.” Ten years later, I am working in a similar manner on a new pair of compositions on the subject of love. A poet’s phrase, in this case the fragment of a poem by Schiller, provided the basis for my orchestral work Teufel Amor. The chamber music counterpart for this work is this purely instrumental love song free of any verbal associations. The composition deals in a compressed form with the same subject matter as Teufel Amor: the Janus-faced character of love as both paradise and a pit of snakes.
—Jörg Widmann
The horn piece Air requires a highly virtuosic technique. At the same time, however, it is completely oriented towards a simple vocal air—“air” in its literal meaning and in its handed-down meaning of “melody.” The sound material consists of various natural harmonic rows, some of which are intersecting. This microtonal cosmos and the constant change of open and stopped playing create an exciting piece on the nature of closeness and distance.
“Etude” is taken literally here as a compositional exercise, as a restricted experimental ground, but also as a violinistic study on a certain playing technique: No. 1 is some sort of “sounding out” of the instrument’s resonant possibilities. No. 2 goes on a journey from a three-part chorale to spirited, unbridled virtuosity. And No. 3 mainly is a left-hand etude.
—Jörg Widmann
Widmann’s Quintet is a deliberate tribute to Mozart’s work of the same instrumentation (K. 452), both of which can be easily combined in concert. In contrast to Mozart’s classical movements, Widmann composed 18 short miniatures, some of which bear evocative titles while others bear musical-theoretical titles such as Verwunschener Garten (Enchanted Garden) and Kontrapunktische Studie (Contrapuntal Study). Traditional and contemporary playing techniques alternate in the musical texture.
In his Three Shadow Dances, Widmann views the clarinet from a completely different perspective. The work requires a performer to take an enthusiastic and playful approach to microtones, multiphonics, key clicks, shadowy notes, and other new playing techniques.
Following several works for large ensembles focused on mastering large-scale structure and musical flow, these pieces take their inspiration from the desire for concentration and reduction. The 10 movements all display a high degree of disparity in all possible aspects. Each piece concentrates on a particular tonal phenomenon (pulse, shaky foundations, noise, monophony, structures with harmonics, etc.), but all sections still remain interlocked. The ending (or its reflection) of each piece forms the initial point of the subsequent movement, thereby transforming disparate elements into a single narrative. Despite the brevity or reduction on the horizontal plane, the vertical plane of these pieces has become quite substantial by my standards: this is my first real ensemble work (for nine wind players, five string players, and two percussionists).
—Jörg Widmann
Notes printed with kind permission of Schott Music.