The Sirens Cycle, the listening-sight of Peter Eötvös

Homer, Joyce and Kafka. These are the authors of the texts that are put into music by Peter Eötvös in the The Sirens Cycle (2016). The Sirens Cycle is a string quartet with coloratura soprano, in line with the concept—the addition of the voice—of Schönberg’s Second Quartet, Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite (in his sung variant or, at least, that can be sung) and Egon Wellesz’s Sonnets by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The album concludes with Eötvös’ first quartet, Korrespondenz, a work dating from 1992, a kind of “mini-opera” without singing, that uses the correspondence between Mozart and his father during the year 1778 as a support. Omer Corlaix reopens the debate on this work for us, after talking about it with the composer himself, specially for Qobuz! The Sirens Cycle is our October Qobuzism on the BMC label. Let yourself be transported by the music of one of the most endearing composers of our time.

Peter Eötvös, born in 1944, dedicates himself to music in the middle of the sixties. Born in Hungary, he follows the teaching of Karlheinz Stockhausen but gets noticed as a conductor of contemporary repertoire by succeeding to Pierre Boulez in 1978 and becoming the musical director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain.

If we had to mention two significant works, we would choose Chinese opera created in 1986 for instrumental ensemble, and Steine also for instrumental ensemble and pebbles, composed for Pierre Boulez’ sixtieth birthday—the pebbles alluding to Boulez’ first name (stone in French)… Peter Eötvös’ great love is opera, the musical dramaturgy of which we can perceive a prefiguration in those two works. In that, he’s close to his elder, the English Harrison Birtwistle (1934): consider Tragoedia (1965) or Secret Theatre (1984). When Boulez gives up the lyrical genre, Peter Eötvös establishes himself at the Opéra de Lyon in 1997 with Three sisters, based on Anton Chekhov’s eponymous masterwork. From then on, Eötvös had been one of the major figures in contemporary creation, and one of the best representatives of the renewal of opera. He was able to adapt the “grand opera” heritage to the musical theater, as Le Balcon (2002) and Angels in America (2004) illustrate.

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With this new work The Sirens Cycle, composed in 2016 for string quartet and for coloratura or soprano voice, Peter Eötvös pursues a musical reflection on lyric form based on an arrangement of three texts coming from James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, a short extract from Homer’s Odyssey and a reflection from Franz Kafka on the silence of sirens.

“The human voice, two tiny silky chords.”

“Vibrations: chords those are.”

“Rhythm begins, you see. I hear.”…

These sentences gathered over the pages of Sirens, the Chapter XI of James Joyce’s Ulysses, have attracted the attention of 20th century composers. Ulysses was first serialized in the United States then published in 1922 by the Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Dates have their significance: the story begins on June 16, 1904 at 8 in the morning, and ends the next day at sunrise. Leopold Blum is the hero of this Dublin odyssey, and internal monologue is his main mode of expression. The work, a true exercise in style, is a parody of Homer’s Odyssey.

It’s the overture, the prelude to Chapter XI, Sirens, that has mostly caught the attention of composers rather than the captivating and evil siren song. The meaning of the text coincides with the verbal material, the musicality takes over, the transparency of the story is postponed indefinitely, and the language becomes musical material.

Joyce had a predecessor in the person of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who published in 1899 in his volume Poésies the Sonnet en X [yx]. There was also, a short while before the Irishman, a Swiss man, Ferdinand Saussure, who taught contrastive grammar from 1881 to 1891 at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris and then at the University of Geneva until 1913 and who published his Course in General Linguistics in 1916, during the Great War. The work “revolutionized” the history of speech and language, rendered obsolete the former philology with its diagrams of opposition, substitution and complementary of vowels and consonants.