Klaus Huber

A Ray of Hope

On the Music of Klaus Huber

By Max Nyffeler

Since the 1983 premiere of his grand oratorio Erniedrigt — Geknechtet — Verlassen — Verachtet… in Donaueschingen, Klaus Huber has been recognised as a composer who believes in the possibility of a better world and expresses this belief in his work. His humanistic ideals are conveyed through music with profound artistic ethos, akin to that of the 1924-born Luigi Nono. Huber has maintained the belief that music is an essential form of communication between people. However, he has never made it easy for his audience to grasp his messages, and he has certainly never conformed to the spirit of the time. Neither the dogmas of the material-focused post-war avant-garde nor the hedonistic allure of the history-forgetting postmodern have ever swayed him from his own path. Huber is a composer whose music and literary statements on the role of art and artists in society are always thought-provoking— a composer who can make himself and others uncomfortable and who is not afraid to show his colours.

Expression and Construction

What is often broadly termed “commitment” in his work is initially conveyed through the texts he employs. In Klaus Huber’s compositions, however, textual content seemingly transforms into musical structure—in the Hegelian sense, they are sublimated within the music. Engagement, therefore, is not a matter of verbal declarations, but is entirely expressed through the music itself. The gestures that characterise his larger orchestral and oratorio works emerge entirely from the musical material. The more differentiated the structure, the more complex the musical expression, the more “depth dimension” it possesses. Huber’s compositions walk the line between intensity of expression and construction. This requires a high degree of formal awareness and metier. In the course of his 60 years of composing, he has developed both skills to the highest level of mastery. Few composers today can make music speak from within as evocatively and effectively as he does.

The Power of Quiet

This is true even in the absence of text, or in the case, as in the string trio Des Dichters Pflug (The Poet’s Plow) from 1989, text is added as an autonomous layer to the instrumental sound; here, individual words and syllables from an Ossip Mandelstam poem are softly whispered by the musicians. This creates a dimension of language that is more sensed than understood, forming a strange yet intimate commentary on the submerged sound world of the strings, tuned in quarter-tones.

Articulate gestures, advocacy for the oppressed or disenfranchised, and vividly painted apocalyptic scenes are only one aspect of Klaus Huber’s music. There is yet another, quieter side, which is just as precisely crafted, intended to communicate with the listener. In these moments, sound retreats entirely into itself. Here, in a state of pure introversion, on the threshold of inaudibility, new dimensions of expression and feeling, just as powerful as those from an outcry, emerge.

The inclination toward chamber music intimacy and the refinement of musical means runs like a red thread through his entire body of work. It can already be observed in the chamber cantata Des Engels Anredung an die Seele (The Angel’s Address to the Soul), whose premiere in Rome in 1959 marked the beginning of Klaus Huber’s international career. This trajectory continues in the 1960s with works such as the string quartet Moteti — Cantiones and the enigmatic James Joyce Chamber Music. In the late 1980s, this characteristic, introverted tone reappears prominently in the composition La terre des hommes, inspired by the writings of the French philosopher Simone Weil. These passages seem like windows into another reality and at the same time point to a new creative phase.

Schwarzerde: The Destruction of Art and the Glimmer of Hope

This new phase began in 1989 with the string trio Des Dichters Pflug. For an entire decade, the figure and work of the Russian poet Ossip Mandelstam were central to Huber’s focus. Mandelstam’s tragic fate as an artist who perished under the harsh realities of society inspired Huber to create his third music theater work, Schwarzerde (Black Earth), premiered in 2001 in Basel. In it, he brings his long-standing theme of the conflict between the individual and the collective, between humane vision and inhumane power, to the stage as a 20th-century artist’s drama. The work suggests that art, perhaps the last refuge of humanity, no longer has a place in the public consciousness of a crassly materialistic society—whether it be Mandelstam’s Soviet Union or the era of uninhibited capitalism. In its transcendence, art is understood by only a few. It circulates as a secret message among like-minded individuals who, through it, can once again experience the old humane values of love and solidarity, as well as the idea of beauty. Yet this message, the piece subtly suggests, will ultimately triumph over all violence—this is the hidden hope that runs through the dark work.

A “speck of light”: This image, used as the title of the middle movement of the orchestral composition Protuberanzen (1985-86), has been a metaphor in Klaus Huber’s work since the early 1970s. It represents what Walter Benjamin calls the “weak messianic power,” the sole foundation of hope. Klaus Huber refers to it as a “glimmer of hope,” and “a rattling at iron doors,” thereby also implying the practical consequences. It is the counterpoint to another key metaphor, that of the instrumental cry, which recurs from his Golgotha piece Tenebrae (1966/67) through Erniedrigt — Geknechtet — Verlassen — Verachtet… to the 2002 chamber cantata Die Seele muss vom Reittier steigen (The Soul Must Descend from its Mount) over a text by Mahmoud Darwish.

In the tension between outcry and gentle hope, between expression and construction, Klaus Huber’s music unfolds its confessional power and intensity. And, as in the lines from Ossip Mandelstam’s Voronezh Notebooks that Huber has repeatedly referenced:

“And quiet labour silvers, silvers finely
The iron plow, the voice sound of the poet,”

so too has his own style become increasingly refined over the years. The often provocative statements of his works have not dissipated but have been captured musically with greater subtlety and precision, and the “metanoiete!”—the call for change that runs through his work like a leitmotif—has gained even more suggestive power through this internalization.

New Horizons

With the development of quarter-tone tuning during the “Mandelstam phase” and the simultaneous adoption of construction methods from Arabic music, along with their cultural-historical backgrounds, a radical reorientation took place in Klaus Huber’s thinking. He approached the study of these new scales and their principles as a practical critique of the traditional European tonal system, the tempered 12-tone scale. As a violinist accustomed to non-tempered intervals, he had always been disturbed by their standardised uniformity. Now, he increasingly viewed them as sterile. In the untapped potential of quarter-tones and the free adaptation of Arabic maqam structures, he saw the possibility of redefining melody: as a sequence of specific interval qualities. This redefinition also had consequences for all other musical dimensions. Harmony, rhythm, the entire language of music underwent a fundamental transformation.

It is rare to see a composer, at over seventy years old, sit down and rethink his craft from the ground up—with the result that he opens up entirely new compositional territory. Igor Stravinsky’s turn to serialism in the 1950s is one such example. When Klaus Huber subjected his compositional thinking to a similar profound revision in the 1990s, it was not only a sign of renewed creative vigor and ongoing artistic curiosity. Something else was also at play: the willingness to confront the tumultuous present with all its conflicts, despair, and hopes, and to attempt, once again, to depict the world as a fragile whole in the work of art.

New Complexity with a Timeless Cantus Firmus

This requires a new, complex form of subjectivity. It appropriates the other—the foreign—without violating it and without losing its own footing. The result is a new kind of composite identity. This is the appropriate response to the challenges globalization poses to the artistic individual today. Klaus Huber has taken this path forward with a blend of instinct and deliberation. Through his artistic engagements with Arabic music—and earlier with Asian and Latin American cultures—he has productively opened himself to the other. In this foreignness, which so often seems dangerous, he has discovered elements of the familiar and, in his Arabic explorations, rediscovered something of the shared roots of Western and Oriental traditions.

It may seem surprising that Klaus Huber, a Swiss composer and a descendant of mountain farmers, could set such far-reaching cultural assimilation processes in motion in his music. After all, the Swiss are known for their composure. Yet it is likely this very trait (or what remains of it) that gives him the confidence to engage so openly with the world. One can also observe something else: in the artistic fruits that Klaus Huber has brought back from his journeys into foreign lands, there is a hidden cantus firmus— The undercurrent of a subjective feeling that is part of the emotional balance of the modern individual. The words for this could be taken from the motto that Heinz Holliger, Huber’s musical companion of many years, selected as the title of a short composition he wrote as a musical birthday greeting for Klaus Huber’s eightieth birthday. It was written almost 600 years ago by the late medieval songwriter Heinrich von Lauffenberg: “Ich wölt daz ich da heime wär”.