Thoughts about Juris Karlsons’ theatrical space
Andris Vecumnieks
Endowed with the abilities of a thinker and a feel for theatricality, Juris Karlsons (1948) has forged his own unique space for creative pursuits within Latvian musical culture. It’s his space for theatre or theatricality, cultivated in the quietness of his work, which has since the 1970s breathed freely and romantically in his music, sometimes ironically aching, other times brightly ceremonial. Karlsons’ shortest “theatre” – and a very viable one at that – seems to be the ceremonial fanfares that conjure up familiar feelings of anticipation in the participants and audiences at the Latvian Great Music Awards every year for the past 25 years. That fanfare has accompanied Karlsons himself onto the stage three times to accept the award: in 2000 for his ballet Sidraba šķidrauts (The Silver Veil), in 2007 for his symphonic vision Vakarblāzma (Sunset Glow), which concludes with an ethereal rural sensation personified by the retreating figure of a Latvian traditional singer, and in 2013 for the ballet Karlsons lido... (Karlsson Flies), inspired by the merry adventures of Astrid Lindgren’s character with whom the composer shares a surname.
Karlsons is once more spending the spring of 2018 at the Latvian National Opera and Ballet, where the aroma of summer flowers will again fill the air as the sun climbs towards Midsummer, Latvia’s most popular festival. And it is precisely on Midsummer Eve that the action in Karlsons’ newest ballet, Antonija #Silmači, takes place. For this work, he took inspiration from Skroderdienas Silmačos (Tailor Days in Silmači) by Rūdolfs Blaumanis, the all-time favourite play among Latvians. And we can be sure that this romantic drama about longing for love and fulfilment in one’s personal life – and Karlsons’ musical theatre space – will definitely be full of conflicts and clever solutions as well as expressions and acknowledgement of genuine emotion.
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Karlsons admits that the game is the leitmotif for his life and existence. “Life is like a game. That sounds good. But I’m not the one who came up with it. A game is a dialogue, or the relationship between three or four people. And a game requires a sharp reaction to various unexpected situations. Just like in life. God has given me a disposition that is able to perceive dialogue and to react. As actors say: catch the concluding remarks and reply back. I play with words when I converse with people, and I don’t try to burden others with myself. Just the opposite – I try to create light, playful relationships that evoke more positive emotions in others than if I were to wail and lament about how awful I feel, about how terrible everything is...”
One special feature of Karlsons’ creative work, life and personality is contrasts. Here we can draw parallels between the expressions of external and internal theatricality in the context of a personality. Thus, Karlsons considers that internal, instead of external, theatricality ought to take priority in his creative work. In his daily life, however, he behaves like ceremonial music – distinctly ostentatious, bombastic, decorative, vibrant. More opposites within a single personality: around other people he is a vibrant, extraverted actor; in music, he is a deeply introverted artist.
“Juris Karlsons’ musical work (just like his life) can be characterised as a game or battle between sharp contrasts and often disparate opposites,” writes Inese Lūsiņa. “On the one hand is everything externally bright: theatre, effective images, games with characters and sounds, musical languages (especially of harmony, texture, instrumentation), vividness, colour, exuberance, richness. But on the other hand is contemplation and a delving inward (often tragically) that is in turn linked with a careful selection and development of musical material.”
Orests Silabriedis expresses a similar thought: “Juris Karlsons is a composer who loves play. He is a strong professional, an admirer of broad orchestral colour with vivid accents in the percussion group. When in a different mood, he is openly sensitive and quickly perceives the human soul. He has written vibrant theatre music and been the musical director at the Daile Theatre. He has long served as the rector at the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music. And he has also been an expert on a television game show. He is difficult to read as a person. He is a social lion with a secret.”
Karlsons also calls himself a complicated person and admits that contrasts are an essential part of his creative work: “In art, powerful emotions and the drama of contrasts are important to me. The fragile and the mighty, the spiritually clean and the ruthless... These opposites let me express myself with more contrast and more vividly, illuminating characters in the most diverse colours.”
Karlsons is known for his intellectual emotion and his emotional intellect, as well as for the way in which he simultaneously combines creative and public work. “I’ve always wanted to do only creative work,” he says. “But jobs and positions have always appeared. I wouldn’t say that I don’t like it or that it bothers me. I think I even perform them fairly well. But, of course, not always.”
Regarding his dual nature, he comments: “On the one hand, I live my life in the public eye; on the other hand, I’m a confirmed recluse, a hermit who likes to hide in his cave, or, in my case, at my house in the country.” And truly, the contrasts of emotions and moods, of openness and secretiveness can all be seen in the way he lives his life, while constant stylistic pursuits and unpredictable creative meanderings fill his music. It is extremely complicated to lure a story out of Karlsons – he does not say everything in words. Who is he? A cool cynic and a poetic soul at the same time? Rational and well-organised or emotionally impulsive? Gregarious or a deeply private being who addresses us with his exceptionally personal musical message? Only through music is he completely open.
Karlsons’ work is characterised at once by a creative openness and a compositional orderliness. In many cases, the drama of contrasts provides not a solution but instead openness, a sign of the incompleteness, question and quest in his music – his compositions do not conclude as such; instead, they break off (Neslēgtais gredzens [The Unclosed Ring], the Second Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, Ceļš [Road], etc.). “The composition is like a locked safe. If the key is too simple and it can be broken open too quickly, the process itself becomes uninteresting. A composition is a process with a secret. And this secret is very important to a work of art. It can be revealed at the end, or not revealed at all,” he says.
One must conclude that Karlsons’ creative work is a space that is open to drama. Throughout his work he solves a symphonic drama, and this manifests itself most vividly not in symphonies but precisely in other genres, including the small symphonic formats, ballets and even chamber music (El Cid, Sidraba šķidrauts, Sonata No. 3 for piano, etc.). Regarding his Sonata No. 3, Karlsons says: “The four-part sonata cycle was structured according to contrasts. The drama of the composition was stimulated by the extreme expressions of reality in today’s world: hate – longing, ruthlessness – dreams, wars – visions and predictions for the future. And at the middle of this dramatic carousel stands the confused individual. The creator of his own world...?” One must agree with the observations of Ieviņa Ancena (Liepiņa) that Karlsons is “the biggest jokester among Latvian musicians and a master of fine irony”. However, he is extremely thoughtful and serious when composing; there are few “fun pieces” in his oeuvre.
Theatricality also appears in the fact that Karlsons compares the composition process to both literature and visual art: “Composition is similar to sculpture, because you gradually chip away everything that’s superfluous from the rock until the lines and nuance appears. Writing music is just as hard. Very hard.” However, he cannot refrain from this creative labour, which is his calling, and speaks philosophically about composing: ‘It takes me very long to find an idea, an intention; it’s complicated, and I suffer. That’s why I don’t usually accept commissions that need to be finished quickly. I think everything over carefully and evaluate it, because I’m aware of the simple physical fact that whatever is created remains here, it is not lost. It returns in the most unexpected ways. One needs a high percentage of courage and daring to say something new. Sometimes it seems that if I were able to not compose, I wouldn’t compose at all. But...fate has spoken.”
When forming the concept for a composition, Karlsons uses a beautiful word in the Latvian language, atskāršana, which is a kind of insight or realisation. For him, a musical composition is not just a formal commission or the desire to express himself creatively; instead, it is a very well-considered philosophy of music. “With each composition I search for the answer to an essential question – a philosophical, personal, social question. With age, a person tends to address ever simpler – and therefore greater and also more essential – things.”
Karlsons, who served as the rector of the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music from 1990 until 2007, remembers something said long ago by Gunnar Bucht, a composer and professor as well as rector of the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. Bucht said that a creative person must know how to disengage in good time from administrative, social and public responsibilities in order to not lose the spark or satisfaction of creativity. Years have passed. And Karlsons is beginning to realise how true Bucht’s words were. However, meeting and working with young students and colleagues prevents him from growing old too quickly. “A creative mind must be as bright and clear as the autumn air: clean, stimulating, intelligent,” he adds. “That’s why it’s worth continuing to work.”
Karlsons has been teaching composition at the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music for more than forty years. He admits that “today’s expanses of music, the new trends and new possibilities are already in the hands of a new generation. And that’s the way it should be. The students of that young generation, with their inexhaustible interest in everything new, unusual, unique and all the possibilities provided by today’s technologically complicated world, are no longer very interested in delving into folios of symphony scores. Modern technologies let them obtain quick, vivid acoustic results, and sometimes very easily at that.
“I belong to the staff-paper generation. Paging through scores, inspecting and comparing page after page, surveying the composer’s intentions as a whole orchestral drama, instead of swiping an electronic screen from one side to the other, never seeing the entire ‘battle panorama’ altogether – that’s my musical world. And I have a feeling that that world is in decline, it’s yesterday’s world.
“I follow the whirlwinds of modern music, art and literature with keen interest. But there’s nothing clearer than opening a folio and, by paging through it, understanding the composer’s intentions.”
Karlsons emphasises the importance of studying literature and considers it the main impulse in the realisation of a composition. The study of literature and philosophy provides rich experience in the formation of a system of signs. “I’m known for doing crazy things like studying everything there is to know about a single writer. In Soviet times we didn’t have fundamental education like that. We were interested in filling the gaps in our knowledge, the things our educations did not teach us.” Karlsons has studied and read all of the works by Blaumanis, Rainis, Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Aspazija, Bārda, Upīts. “When I was writing Jāzeps un viņa brāļi (Joseph and his Brothers), I studied the complete works of Rainis; when I was thinking about my first ballet, I studied Blaumanis; when I was looking for a drama for the ballet, I read all of Aspazija’s plays. I’ve read all seventeen volumes of Mayakovsky’s complete works, which include some phenomenal love poetry written in Paris. Absolutely fantastic poetry!” Karlsons believes that a composition can only emerge after having read the entire works of an author. Some of his compositions that have been inspired by such fundamental study of literature include the words ‘reading’ or ‘pages’ in their titles (the ballet Ugunī [Into the Fire] – a concerto for orchestra in five parts After a Reading of Blaumanis; the symphonic pages of the ballet Sidraba šķidrauts; and so on). This is because such a name allows greater mobility and more room for interpretation: “After a Reading... – that’s not Blaumanis, they’re my contemplations about his work.”
The influence of theatre music on Karlsons’ creative work also manifests itself as transformations of the theatre music and literary space. Composing music for a theatre production motivates him to become acquainted with all of the work by the play’s author. For example, in 1981 he was writing the music for the Daile Theatre’s production of Rainis’ Jāzeps un viņa brāļi, and also the complete works of Rainis were published. After intensely studying these works, Karlsons turned more intensely to Rainis’ poetry and creative output. In effect, 1982–1983 became the year of Rainis. And thus the literary space of the poet Rainis transformed into the musical space of the composer Karlsons.
The titles of his compositions are just like the titles of the plays, because they are encoded with the potential of the theatre’s actions (play, characters, dialogue) and direction. “The names of compositions appear in my mind, they’re unpredictable, but they are sought for a very long time, the words are considered and selected very carefully so that they pictorially try to correspond to the music.” As the result of studying the book Lielo patiesību meklējumi (The Quest for the Great Truths) by Edgars Imants Siliņš, in 2001 Karlsons discovered the philosophy of Lao-Tzu, which inspired the creation of Koana and the Concert Symphony (for two pianos and orchestra).
In many cases, Karlsons’ compositions have an unconscious context; they are both associative and stimulating of listeners’ imaginations, and they are also visual, and thus theatrical. Through the names of his compositions, he activates philosophical messages and the semantics of signs and symbols, which are the result of the above-mentioned studies. In his work, universal systems of symbols gain new interpretations and receptions, because Karlsons’ own story is unique and distinctive. Dilstošā mēness zīmes (Signs of the Waning Moon), Klusumā dzimstošās dzīvības balss (The Voice of Life that is Born in Silence), Cerību un sāpju noktirne, (Nocturne of Pain and Hope), Zvaigžņoto debesu balsis (Voices of the Starry Sky) – these are very typical names for Karlsons’ compositions. His composition names also reveal his infinitely rich sacred space, which is present already in his first compositions but truly blossoms in his work from the end of the 20th century.
One of the values in Karlsons’ creative work is that its themes and imagery are not concentrated only in one genre but travel between genres. Symphonic music, concertos, sacred music, ceremonial music – these are all equally saturated with both philosophical and spiritual content. There is unique parity in the distribution of genres; all genres are identical in their importance. A similar treatment is afforded the folk song, which not only expresses national identity but is also another form of creativity that is manifested not only in folkloric folksong arrangements and stylisations but also as a quote or allusion in many “extra-folkloric” compositions – the sneaking in and encoding of folksong intonations in a theme is a composition method that allows a national identity to be recognised and identified in a much more indirect and refined way. Intonations of folk music are thus encoded in both the Concerto No. 2 for piano and orchestra as well as Zvaigžņoto debesu balsis (Voices of the Starry Sky), sacred music and other works, and especially vividly in Vakarblāzma (Sunset Glow).
In evaluating the decades of Karlsons’ work, each of them contains unique highlights that mark a concentration of his theatrical and symbolic space in the corresponding time period:
- 1970–1980 – Symphony in four parts (1980), the first musical message inspired by the theatre;
- 1980–1990 – Magna opera Domini, cantata for mixed choir, solo and organ, Psalm 110 (1989), Karlsons’ long-cherished and initially hidden first contribution to sacred music, which from then onward became his defining genre;
- 1990–2000 – the ballet Sidraba šķidrauts (Silver Veil) (1999/2000), a dramaturgically masterful summary of the composer’s 20th-century work;
- 2000–2010 – Adoratio, symphony for choir and orchestra (2010), a new perspective on the sacred and secular dimensions and the interaction between the two.
An evaluation of these “boundary compositions” reveals the spiral-like development of theatre music and sacred music over almost half a century of Karlsons’ oeuvre.
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Only time will tell whether the highlight of this decade will be theatre music, namely, the new ballet Antonija #Silmači. Three closeups are still currently fresh: Le lagrime dell’anima (Tears of the Soul) for choir and piano (2013, “I couldn’t find poetry suitable for this intention. I therefore wrote the text myself, an address to God.”), the theatrical concerto for cello, piano, percussion and orchestra written for Trio Art-i-Shock and the anniversary of Latvijas Radio 3 “Klasika” (2016), and the Gliese 581 concerto for orchestra (Ninth Liepāja Concerto) (2016, “Using the Hubble Telescope, scientists recently discovered a distant planet that’s very similar to Earth. It’s just as beautiful, with an ocean, an atmosphere and possibly also life forms. They named it Gliese 581. This discovery made me think about how careless we’ve been with our own planet from time to time.”). In an interview with Edgars Raginskis of Latvijas Radio 3 “Klasika”, Karlsons explained, “This composition isn’t simply a symphonic score. I actually wrote it as the last one of my life.” This revelation fits into both the theatrical and the sacred space. Luckily, in his life space, Karlsons’ “as” is valuable and worthy of emphasis.
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An insight prepared by Zane Prēdele into the dissertation of composer, musicologist and conductor Andris Vecumnieks, titled The Phenomenon of Theatricality in Music: The Theatre Space of Juris Karlsons (2015). Precise references to quote sources (1990–2015) can be found in the dissertation. Most of the quotes here are taken from Vecumnieks’ conversations and correspondence with Karlsons. Other sources include published articles and interviews with the composer by Kaija Zemberga, Inga Saksone, Orests Silabriedis, Gunda Vaivode and Romāns Koļeda; reviews and articles by Ieviņa Ancena (Liepiņa) and Inese Lūsiņa; as well as Karlsons’ own comments about his compositions published in programme notes.