“GOT LOST”: a lost laundry basket and more

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)


Libretto:

Text 1 (Nietzsche)
Friedrich Nietzsche

27. Der Wandrer

Kein Pfad mehr! Abgrund rings und Todtenstille!
So wolltest dus! Vom Pfade wich dein Wille!
Nun, Wandrer, gilts! Nun blicke kalt und klar!
Verloren bist du, glaubst du an Gefahr.

(by Friedrich Nietzsche: Die fröhliche Wissenschaft.
Scherz, List und Rache. Vorspiel in deutschen Reimen, Chemnitz 1882)

Text 2 (Pessoa)
Fernando Pessoa [using the alias Álvaro de Campos]

Todas as cartas de amor são ridículas

Todas as cartas de amor são
Ridículas.
Não seriam cartas de amor se não fossem
Ridículas.

Também escrevi em meu tempo cartas de amor,
Como as outras,
Ridículas.

As cartas de amor, se há amor,
Têm de ser
Ridículas.

Mas, afinal,
Só as criaturas que nunca escreveram
Cartas de amor
É que são
Ridículas.

Quem me dera no tempo em que escrevia
Sem dar por iso
Cartas de amor
Ridículas.

A verdade é que hoje
As minhas memórias
Dessas cartas de amor
É que são
Ridículas.

(Todas as palavras esdrúxulas,
Como os sentimentos esdrúxulos,
São naturalmente
Ridículas)

Text 3 (got lost-Annonce)

Today my laundry basket got lost.
It was last seen standing in front of the dryer.
Since it is pretty difficult to carry the laundry without it I'd be most happy to get it back.

(Notice in the elevator of the Villa Walther in Berlin-Grunewald, 2001/02?)


CD:
Yuko Kakuta (soprano), Yukiko Sugawara (piano)

CD Wergo WER 73672
Sarah Maria Sun (soprano), Jan Philip Schulze (piano)
CD mode records, mode 297


Bibliography:

Hiekel, Jörn Peter: Helmut Lachenmann und seine Zeit, Laaber: Laaber 2023, S. 402-418.
Nonnenmann, Rainer: Bilder-Sturm-Flut. Helmut Lachenmanns GOT LOST zwischen Ikonen, Ikonoklasmus und Selbstbildnis, in: Helmut Lachenmann: Musik mit Bildern? Hrsg. von Matteo Nanni und Matthias Schmidt (= eikones, hrsg. von Nationalen Forschungsschwerpunkt Bildkritik an der Universität Basel), München: Wilhelm Fink 2012, pp. 141-169.
Saxer, Marion: Kunstgesang als Klangsymbol. Belcanto in experimenteller Vokalmusik nach 1960, in: Musik & Ästhetik, Heft 92 (Oktober 2019), S. 5-25