Darf man das? Werke verfremden? Übertragen? Johann Sebastian Bach komponierte 18 Choräle für die Orgel in seinen letzten Lebensjahren. Die schönsten Werke sind das, rein und – wie Beethoven einmal sagte – direkt von Herzen zu Herzen gehend. Wie erklärt es sich, dass es so viele sogenannter Transkriptionen für Klavier gibt? Werke aller Arten, Opernarien, Lieder, Sinfonien, Choräle, Chorwerke, Kammermusikwerke – unzählige, die bearbeitet, frei arrangiert oder wortgenau transkribiert wurden für Klavier (solo). Dabei gibt es ja unendlich viel wundervolles Klavierrepertoire. Nun, man will diese Werke spielen. So einfach ist das. Nichts ist eindringlicher als das unmittelbare Erlebnis. So kamen immer wieder Pianisten dazu, ihre Liebe, ihre Zuneigung einem Werk gegenüber darin auszudrücken, indem sie das jeweilige Werk für das Klavier zu transkribieren. Schon Bach selbst hat viele Werke bearbeitet, Mozart auch, Beethoven auch. Franz Liszt war derjenige, der die sogenannte Klavierparaphrase dann in den Konzertkanon mit einer solch enormen Kraft und Fantasie hinauskatapultierte wie kaum ein anderer vor ihm. Aus dieser Tradition entstanden die bedeutendsten Bearbeitungen “fremder” Werke , so von Sergei Rachmaninoff, Ferruccio Busoni, Egon Petri, Vladimir Horowitz und dem großen Wilhelm Kempff (und unzähligen anderen bedeutenden Pianisten, die alle aufzuzählen einfach unmöglich erscheint…). Das hier ist die mir Liebste. Und Heiligste.
Fabian Wolff
I have never talked to Ashley in person. Of course that’s not strange at all. We met on Oliver Polak’s Facebook page. One of us made a joke about Kant being a little shtetl boy by the name of Imre Kantele who grew up to be a comedian in the Catskills – I can’t remember if it was her or me. Now we have a very 21st century correspondence about very 20th century things. Sometimes even 19th century.
There is this Talmudic concept of the tinok shenishba, she explains to me – the “captured infant” who was raised by Gentiles and only later in life comes back, or just in general grew up without learning about Judaism. Ashley feels the opposite might be true for her: a mostly non-Jewish child who was kidnapped and somehow ended up in the strange world of German Jews.
This is the world she’s living in now, which isn’t so easy in Texas. So she’s living very virtually these days anyway – her husband lives in another state, and she’s working on a project on how Jewish identity circulates on the Internet. Which probably means that she’s pretending to be the Lubavitcher Rebbe and trolls Chabad blogs? I must ask her.
Ashley says she has never known anything but “German” and “Jews” in the same breath, but not like you think. This “but not like you think” is a great gift.
If you’ve ever been to an official Jewish event you know that “he or she is a true mensch” is just about the laziest compliment you can make someone. So I’m not gonna say that but of course it’s probably true. What I’m gonna say instead: Ashley knows many things other people have forgotten – and she wants to share them with the world too. A true teacher, as they say.
She drove all the way down with a Greyhound bus from New York City to México, D. F. How long does it take? 100 hours? 100 years? 100 years of solitude. We met in Puebla, Volkswagen city, near the Popocatépetl. We had dinner with guys from Quebec, and couldn’t guess a word they were saying. We continued the journey together South. Always South. Mary was doing the Spanish talking, I was doing the Mexican nodding. We bought papaya, and mango, every single day. And Mary was eating peanuts anywhere we went. Maybe she was doing a Hänsel and Gretel trail to find the way back to New York. We went into the jungle in Palenque where I shot a picture from the same angle my grandfather did, maybe in the 1960s. We continued to the Cataratas de Agua Azul. And there we got robbed. Two guys jumped out of the jungle. They had a rifle and a machete. We got robbed, is actually not accurate. I got robbed (they took my camera with the picture from Palenque and they intended to take my shoes: not the right size). Mary is this kind of person who just doesn’t get robbed. She merely gave them five dollars out of mercy (Mary full of Grace), like a tribute for the fact that we crossed the holy land of their ancestors. Then we ran. South. All South. Yes, we ran very fast. Heart beat of 220. We continued. South. Chiapas. San Cristóbal de las Casas where Mary wanted to stay in the Casa Na Bolom, doing research on lost languages or something else. However, we continued to Oaxaca. We played basketball on 3000 meters. We did handstands on the basketball field on 3000 meters (we once tried to walk down the Freie Strasse in Basel, handstand wise. Guess who succeeded). Then we went to see the Silent Ocean. Mazunte. We separated. Mary stayed, I don’t know for how long. 100 hours? 100 days? While I drove up to Acapulco, imagining a life as a cliff diver. We met 100 years later again under the Brooklyn bridge.
See for yourself, look at the image.
Der Größte. Die Art und Weise seines Musizierens suchen bis heute ihresgleichen. Er, der so selektiv vorging, nicht alles dirigierte, was auf seinem Pult landete. Aber was er berührte, das wurde zu mehr als nur zu Gold. Bis heute existiert kaum ein Dokument seines Schaffens, welches nicht den Status des Einmaligen genießt. Und wenn nicht unangreifbar in Fragen der Interpretation, so doch absolut unstrittig im Bezug auf die totale Kompromisslosigkeit eines Musikers vor allem sich selbst gegenüber. Um jeden Ton, jede Phrase und jeden Moment wird gerungen. Wer das nicht glaubt, nun ja, der sollte einfach nur die ersten fünf Sekunden dieser großartigen Dokumentation erleben. Eine Explosion, und Wagners Tristan sticht mitten ins Herz. Carlos Kleiber, 2004 leider zu früh verstorben.
There is something about Munich which might have gotten lost a bit in the last, say, ten years – with the onslaught of Berlin, with the draining of people, this constant trickle of creativity leaving a city which was once built on the very notion of Geist und Intelligenz, I dare say: Because apart from the very Bayerischkeit of Munich there was always a certain sensibility that was less counterculture and more mainstream in a good way, it did not flee and flourish on the margins, which can be easy, but that it wanted to achieve something and aim at the center of things, which might be harder. It was there and it was important, in the 1910s and 1920s with artists and writers like Kandinski und Mühsam and Feuchtwanger, this style, this spirit, this pride, and it should be there in the 2010s – a cosmopolitan casualness that might be best achieved in a smaller city like Munich, rather than in self-congratulatory Berlin, through a concentration on the new ideas, an eye for the international style, a daring, a focus, a network of good: Ayzit Bostan, for sure, would be in the middle of all of this. She is, in a way, an in-between kind of person, between fashion and art, between cultures, between fame and followers who are in love with all the things she designs, clothes, shoes, bags. She could live anywhere, she could work anywhere, and in a way I always have to remind myself that we are indeed in Munich when I go to her studio on Landwehrstraße, a place that has so little to do with this explosion of money that is Munich today, a strange combination of Porsches and Arabs coming for shopping or medicine and all these off-road crazy people heading to some mountain or another, constantly. I love Munich, don*t get me wrong, and this is why I love Ayzit. Munich could be like her, Munich should be like her. A proud and smart and creative place that does not constantly feel the need to position itself against Berlin. A place for a woman with Turkish roots who has this air of New York around her and a pleasant notion of knowing where we are heading. A citizen of the 21st century. Like Ayzit.
When you are over your Nietzsche obsession, leaving Sils-Maria behind, passing by Lake Sils, and reaching the Maloja pass, you will be finally able to see her. Maira. She flows west through the Val Bregaglia into Italy, sourcing Lake Como, and finally reaching the Mediterranean Sea. But she doesn’t stop there. Sometimes she flows to Berlin. Sometimes she has to play something in one of Georg’s and Bobby’s 80*81 productions. Sometimes it was working for DAS MAGAZIN. Her grandmother’s house in Zuoz must be a dream. If it was to start a new religion, it would be her name to name it. For the time being it’s Berlin. It’s Heimat. It’s Jippie Ja Ja Jippie Jippie Jaay.
I knew Nikolai from a distance. He was part of the artist duo Future 7 with Florian Wojnar and Future 7 worked on the relation between collector and artist. With his great name and his great moustache I guessed Nikolai would spend his days in cafés reading Raymond Roussel and drinking Sherry all day. He seemed 27,4% Austrian and 27,4% Russian.
Some years later, when Future 7 had past, we met in Brazil with Arno Brandlhuber’s nomadic architecture class. We went from Sao Paulo by bus to Angra dos Reis, where the Germans had build an atomic plant between Rio and SP in the 1970s. A dark decade for Brazil while ruled by generals. The reactor Angra 1 is situated between the beach and a mountain, which tends to slip when it is raining. The Tupinamba Indians called it ‘Itaorna’, meaning ‘rotten stone’. At the time we were there Angra 3 was in prepartion, only the German money guarantee was missing. Even the great Lula da Silva wanted the second reactor. Our interventions however caused the obstruction of Angra 3 and all other projected nuclear plants in Brazil at least until 2030. (When We Were Good)
I still don’t know if Nikolai is or was studying at Arno’s class, doing his PhD or if he just comes along from time to time to these excursions. I know that he teaches in Zurich at the ETH with Karin Sander and I know that he is very active in Berlin when it comes to city planning––he even organizes some cool club of super smart architects. On the field trip to Brazil I got to know him as very clever and elegant and judicious, so maybe 0% Austrian, 0% Russian? And funny. And he has a lovely family.
PS: The only thing which made me slightly suspicious was––Nikolai is part of the Lichtenberg-Tower-4––that he doesn’t fancy the idea of a hill with goats between the towers. Too much of an image, too much of an artist’s idea, he said. He wants another tower built out of containers (see San Gimignano), which is nice. He wants projects, research and things like that. Okay. Even so Nikolai, with the hill you are already overruled.
It was in the very last hours of the year 2010. Maybe eight hours to go. Year 2010? Was it a good year? What did you do? We were standing at the offspring of the artificial river Cheonggyecheon in Seoul. It was unbearably cold. Soohyun explained her native city to me. I tried to listen, but I was hardly breathing. Soohyun didn’t seem to care much about the cold. Then we met Sae, we went for some Samgetyang, chicken soup with rice. The old serving ladies laughed at us (laughed on us?), and we laughed back. And then we separated and the year had maybe four hours to go and I got lost in the night, in the cold, in Seoul. Soohyun tells you about her projects and the houses she is going to build and she connects you to all these people in Seoul and you try to absorb everything but fail, as she is bursting with energy and you are freezing. And then you meet her in Zurich, but Zurich was too small for her, so now it’s London. And you remember that the first time was in Basel. You were introduced by a common architect friend, and you realize how amazingly globalised the architect’s world is. Go to Cargo Bar in Basel on a Thursday night and it’s full of Herzog & de Meuron architects from all over the world and you are exotic because, yes, you actually were born in this small city. And Soohyun is all globalised, all Korean, all over the world, all energy.