HELMUT  OEHRING

This war by the artist Goya is the human destruction of humanity par excellence. This series of etchings, Desastres de la Guerra, created between 1810 and 1816, in haste and deliberation, in directness and distance, is Goya's most personal intervention in the monstrous struggle; it is image and symbol, reflection and picture puzzle; it is the identification of nature and man as the incarnation of human nature; it is the identification of history and art as the incarnation of society. It is the sequence of real events as a sequence of unreal events; it is reality and dream in one. Nothing escapes the artist, he glosses over nothing, he conceals nothing, he exposes everything. It is a statement in the most comprehensive sense imaginable, not confined to just one image, which then becomes static, timeless, and classic; quite the contrary: the artistic event is timeless in the opposite sense – it continues forever, capturing not just a single moment, but countless moments in rapid succession. It is Dante's Inferno, only no longer apart from this world, but as this world itself; it is not divine punishment, but human action. It is the paraphrase of human misery. Konrad Farner, 1972

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​Helmut Oehring takes a moment from this “rapid series of countless moments” by Francisco de Goya as the starting point for his own series of “musical snapshots.” Goya's etchings Desatres de la Guerra form the backdrop for five cinematic compositions in dialogue with Goya's contemporary Ludwig van Beethoven – symphony, oratorio, ensemble music, string quartet, and multimedia requiem – different “films in music” developed from Goya's negatives: scenes of war, of “civilian victims.” In his “pictorial war reporting,” Goya raised the question of perspective: the perspective of those who experience the horrors firsthand; the perspective of those who report on them –artistically or otherwise; and the perspective of those who are reminded by this report of what happened and is happening. Oehring, the son of deaf parents, seeks dialogue in the GOYA cycle not only with the Spanish painter, but also with his “brother in spirit,” Beethoven: Goya and Beethoven were both increasingly isolated within the societies whose cultural centers they occupied due to their loss of hearing. Both were torn by conflict: enthusiastic about the ideas of the French Revolution – embodied and at the same time betrayed in the person of Napoleon Bonaparte – and at the same time closely connected in the fight against the horrors of battles and wars for a “free” world. And both quoted political content, painted and composed concrete moments: Goya not only in the Desastres de la Guerra, Beethoven not only in the Eroica...