Thomas Larcher and Michael Haas in Conversation

Abstract

Austrian Studies 26 (2018), 30–39© Modern Humanities Research Association 2019 Thomas Larcher and Michael Haas in Conversation Thomas Larcher and Michael Haas King’s College London, 31 August 2017 Michael Haas: There are several things that come to me when I listen to the symphony, Kenotaph, one of which always occurs to me when I approach a new symphony by an Austrian composer: the idea of national or cultural identity. And I say this because, in my own work, I discovered that composers who had been thrown out of Austria in 1938 began to write symphonies after the war was over. And they had never written a symphony before. Egon Wellesz wrote nine symphonies, but only started in 1945. Ernst Toch wrote seven symphonies, also starting in 1945. Erich Wolfgang Korngold wrote a symphony. This need to identify a kind of Austrian return, particularly when they’re outside Austria, when they’ve been thrown out of Austria, this idea of finding a kind of musical identity in something that most of us would just consider a form. And I was impressed by what you were saying about wanting to return to these old forms, through the idea of the symphony, and yet obviously none of the movements in your symphony take on the classical structure. They avoid that, they’re much more Mahlerian in trying to create a kind of overall cosmos, whilst remaining a symphony. And I don’t know to what extent you see the idea of the symphony as being an identifying feature as an Austrian composer. Thomas Larcher: Well, maybe I can start at quite another point. For me, just in terms of my personal development, I wouldn’t have dared to call any work, any orchestra work — be it half an hour long or ten minutes long — a symphony, because a symphony for me always was something really holy, something really substantial, and I was very unsure about my own pieces for most of my life, until I was around the age of forty. And having been a player, a pianist, a concert promoter and having admired so much music, which has been there and which had been written alongside my playing, and for me, by composers like Beat Furrer or Olga Neuwirth or [Toshio] Hosokawa or whomever. And I never felt that I really could belong in this company, and somehow I still have to say to myself that I just do what I do, and I try to do what I do, but at some point it just became unavoidable to call a work a symphony. And maybe one name you mentioned, Mahler, may be a very crucial name in all that, because you say that my symphonies don’t really strictly follow the forms of the movements Thomas Larcher and Michael Haas in Conversation 31 they used to have towards the beginning of the twentieth century. And there is this meeting between Mahler and Sibelius, where it’s told that Sibelius was struggling with the form and was very concerned about the form and Mahler said that for him the most important thing was that a symphony contains the whole world. And I remembered this at some point, and I thought: well, the whole musical world must be in every piece I write, it must have everything, from death to joy and every facet as a nucleus in it. But I must openly admit also that whenever someone said ‘your pieces somehow sound Austrian, I cannot tell you why, but there is a distinctive Austrian tone’, I would just get mad, because I hated it, because I didn’t see myself in any Austrian tradition at all. But inevitably of course when you hear it with a bit more distance, then you have to admit, that’s probably right. Michael Haas: Well, I’m not so sure I’d say that the music itself is quintessentially Austrian. The return to the idea of the symphony is what I find quintessentially Austrian. And I also find it interesting that an Austrian composer dealing with the subject of flight, of translocation, of assuming a host-land as opposed to a homeland, that this...