HELMUT OEHRING
2025*2026 LUXEMBURG * MONTRÉAL * MARSEILLE * BASEL * WIEN * BERLIN * AMSTERDAM * ROTTERDAM * DRESDEN * COTTBUS 2024*2025 PARIS * TAIPEH * CHICAGO * LOS ANGELES * FRANKFURT A.M. * WEIMAR * STUTTGART * KARLSRUHE * BASEL * METZ * STRASBOURG * NANTES * SZCZEZIN * ZAGREB *
C O L L A G E I N S T R U M E N T A L - V O C A L M I S E N S C È N E
With Angleus Novus II, Helmut Oehring follows in the footsteps of Walter Benjamin: his work, which hovers between poetry, philosophy, media criticism and historical theory; his existence, which oscillates between aesthetics and politics, inner emigration and exile, life and death, in constant dialogue with Paul Klee's drawing of the Angelus Novus. The internationally renowned composer Oehring does this with unusual openness: as a work in progress, his score deliberately incorporates contributions from students at the Bern University of the Arts in the fields of composition, improvisation, video, movement and spatial design in so-called farewell or dark rooms. This artistically unique collage, creatively brought to life in the formative encounter with Helmut Oehring, is possibly a place where the ruins of paradise briefly come together to form a kind of bridge to Babel, an archipelago sculpture.
Based on Stefanie Wördemann's libretto, which sensitively balances Benjamin's philosophical and autobiographical texts, the Angleus Novus II score unfolds in vocal and instrumental solos, duets, chamber music ensembles and tutti. It allows students and lecturers, jazz and newly composed music, opera singers and théâtre musical, media artists and live electronics, sign language poetry and spoken choruses to tune into a fluid perception of time.
Walter Benjamin purchased Paul Klee's painting in 1920 and wanted to name his ambitious critical-reflective magazine project, which ultimately could not be realised, after it. For the time being, a private dialogue developed between Benjamin and the painting, mostly in the form of private notes on postcards to his friends. It was only later, when his life became increasingly turbulent and with it his dialogue with the painting, that Benjamin addressed Klee's painting in his writings, both private and intended for publication. I had a similar experience. I carried the painting around with me: it told me something, it resonated. But for many years I did not think at all about turning the painting into music. Klee has been very important to me for a long time. His small-format works in particular have had a lasting effect on me. The movement in his pictures. The simultaneity of artistic greatness and a naïve, childlike perspective. And I was very moved to find his grave in Bern, right next to the museum, on the edge of the children's cemetery. Helmut Oehring
D É J A - V U / E N T E N D U
The composition Angelus Novus II is based on the phenomenon of déjà vu/entendu – in the poetic, historical-philosophical and synaesthetic sense of Walter Benjamin:
Déjà vu has often been described. But is this actually an appropriate term? Shouldn't we talk about events that affect us like an echo, the reverberation of which seems to have originated somewhere in the darkness of our past lives? Incidentally, this corresponds to the fact that the shock with which a moment enters our consciousness as something we have already experienced usually comes to us in the form of a sound. It is a word, a rustling or a thumping, which has the power to call us unprepared into the cool tomb of the past, from whose vault the present seems to hold us back only as an echo. It is strange that no one has yet explored the opposite of this rapture — the shock with which a word makes us pause, like a forgotten muff in our room. Just as this leads us to conclude that a stranger was there, so there are words or pauses that lead us to conclude that there is an invisible stranger: the future, which she forgot with us.
Walter Benjamin: A Death Notice (aus: Berlin childhood)
The libretto draws on key texts from Benjamin's historical-philosophical essays on the intertwining of past, present and future, in particular his Historical Thesis IX on the ‘Angel of History’: its visual inspiration is Paul Klee's Angelus Novus series of paintings with its varying angel motifs. Klee's pictures, like Benjamin's historical theses, which were published posthumously in 1940, reflect ‘prophetically’ on the philosophical questions that became existential for them and for countless intellectuals and artists in the 1930s in the confrontation with fascism, Nazi dictatorship, exile, World War II and the Shoah, and which then shaped subsequent generations' reflections on a ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ (Adorno/Horkheimer).
Benjamin had purchased a drawing from Klee's angel series in the early 1920s and gave it to his friend and biographer Gershom Scholem at the beginning of his flight from Nazi Germany. Scholem took the picture with him into exile in Israel, where it last hung in his apartment in Jerusalem – since Scholem's death, it has been considered lost.
There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. It depicts an angel who looks as if he is about to move away from something he is staring at. His eyes are wide open, his mouth is open and his wings are spread. This is what the angel of history must look like. He has turned his face towards the past. Where we see a chain of events, he sees a single catastrophe that piles rubble upon rubble and hurls it at his feet. He would like to linger, awaken the dead and piece together what has been shattered. But a storm blows from paradise, caught in his wings, and is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him inexorably into the future, to which he turns his back, while the pile of rubble before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.
Walter Benjamin Thesis IX / On the Concept of History 1940
The collage instrumental-vocal mis-en-scène focuses primarily on the philosophical, historical and political dimensions of the Angelus Novus theme. However, religious debate is also provoked by the possibility of a documentary, poetic, artistic exchange between participants of different faiths, cultures, languages and nationalities. In addition to Benjamin's Angelus Novus texts, the libretto also deals with his poems (sonets) and key moments in his biography (autobiographical writings and letters), which found their final conclusion in his suicide while fleeing Nazi Germany: the freely chosen and predetermined moment of his own death, which – as hinted at in the oral farewell letter to his companion and spiritual heir Theodor W. Adorno – itself appears like déjà vu. Added to this are autobiographical texts by Paul Klee, creating a fictional dialogue between the two artists Klee and Benjamin as the starting point for the dialogue between all participants and their current artistic and documentary-autobiographical interpretations of the Angelus Novus theme in the here and now of the work in progress.