HELMUT  OEHRING

I   C O U L D   S E E   T H E   H A N D ,   B U T   I   W A S  D A Z E D ... 

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GOYA III. Veía la mano, pero como alelado is the third work of Helmut Oehring’s GOYA-cycle, whose large-formate compositions refer to special aspects in lifes and works of Francisco de Goya and Ludwig van Beethoven. The title Veía la mano, pero como alelado originates from Leoncadia Zorilla, the close friend of Goya, who in a letter reported about his dying. Parallels to Beethoven who, like Goya, became deaf and was compelled to communicate by sign language »with his hands«, attribute the citation a special meaning. Helmut Oehring concerns Beethoven’s late stringquartet op.131, its fragmentation and complex structure unsettled his contemporaries. 

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I S   A N Y B O D Y   O U T   T H E R E ?

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In GOYA III, I refer to drawings by Francisco Goya, namely the sketches he made in exile in Bordeaux in the years before his death, parallel to his last major oil paintings, such as his self-portrait. Like Beethoven, Goya chose ‘small’ forms, self-published ‘chamber works’ for his content-related and formal innovations and his individual critical examination of reality as a ‘private’ counterpart to officially commissioned and honoured large-format works throughout his life. The etchings Desastres de la Guerra, for example, which I chose as the backdrop for my orchestral work GOYA I and my memoratorio GOYA II, are Goya's ‘documentary drawings’ as perhaps the first visual war correspondent, snapshots from Spain during the Napoleonic Wars, focusing on civilian victims. In the Bordeaux sketchbooks, he focuses on the themes of age, illness, isolation and death, the dialectic of the will to live and assert oneself, hope and despair, future prospects and resignation. Here, Goya draws those marked by life, portraying the old and the sick, the beggars and the insane, the displaced, the locked away and those waiting alone for death – people who, unlike in feudal Spain, no longer had a place in the new bourgeois society and art of France.

 

Shortly before his own death, Goya once again questions the gaze: that of the one who experiences horror; that of the one who reports it; and that of the one who is reminded of and thrown back on what happened and is happening. The quote from Leocadia Zorilla, Goya's friend, in the title of GOYA III means: He looked at his hand as if in simple amazement. Goya's last gaze – powerless and unprotected – was directed at his hand, which had drawn everything he saw in the world: the ‘organ of communication’ of this highly communicative artist, who, despite lifelong threats as a political painter from the Inquisition in Spain, despite the violent changes in his homeland brought about by Napoleon's troops, whose revolutionary democratic innovations he had actually welcomed, and above all despite his deafness, never ceased his direct confrontation with the spokesmen and opponents of his culture and society – kindred in spirit to Beethoven and, like him, standing at the centre of his culture although isolated by his own infirmity, forced to speak beyond the ears and mouths: that of the eyes and hands. Pink Floyd formulated the fundamental existential question that is particularly relevant to these artists, but also to me and, I believe, to all human beings: ‘Is anybody out there?’

 

When I began my GOYA cycle, I was primarily concerned with examining the artists mentioned above, with the responsibility they assume in their art and pass on to me, among others. When I listen to Beethoven seriously or look at Goya's works, I cannot do so solely from the perspective of beauty or craftsmanship, but must always consider the causes and conditions under which their art was created. Goya's decision to produce his etchings throughout his life, even though there was no commission to do so, without self-interest and at great risk, impresses me deeply. This testifies to a sense of responsibility and subversiveness that, in my opinion, all art should have. The inner pressure not only to paint great pictures, but also to convey content, to fill content with reality at the highest artistic level, moves me deeply. Reality has never harmed any art form. Like Goya, Beethoven chose small chamber music formats for experimentation, for what arose within him as something new from his reflection on what penetrated him as a person and his works from the outside, which he then transformed into, for example, the unprecedented late string quartets – experiments in form, content and aesthetics.
 Whether voluntarily or involuntarily, Beethoven, like Goya, chose a path parallel to official high art, one of aesthetic ‘innerness’ – the series of composers who followed him in this ranges from Schumann to Webern to Luigi Nono... They all accepted the increasing incomprehension and even complete misinterpretation by the public – their doubting, critical, political attitude had a very subversive effect, even in the supposedly small, ‘inner’ works... Helmut Oehring