Not only visualists, but also the audience already suspected in advance that the »hugo wolf festival« in 2010 would attempt to combine different things that do not really belong together. To accompany performances of Romantic Lieder by Hugo Wolf (1860–1930), musically curated by the baritone Wolfgang Holzmair, the funding initiative had invited five contemporary artists to make the Austrian-Slovenian composer’s culturally demanding art songs more accessible through the use of digital images.
As opposed to electronic music, or in night clubs where visuals need to compete only with musicians sitting behind their laptops or DJs standing at decks, the classical setting at the RadioKulturhaus seemed to foretell all possible difficulties that the planned combination of image and sound might bring. On stage, there was one piano and several microphones, while a giant screen hung in the background. The performers, who were mostly known to the audience of connoisseurs, stepped onto the stage in glamorous evening gowns and suits, obscuring any immediate association with new media and contemporary visual culture. Women in evening gowns figure just as rarely in the latter as do Röslein and Rösslein, which do however play an important part in the poems of Eduard Mörike.

Although it is impossible to do justice with images of roses and horses to the complexity of Mörike’s lyrics, which vary between mellifluous Biedermeier and radical escapism, this did not stop Victoria Coeln from including these motifs anyway. As is typical for her atmospheric visualizations, the artist made use of layers of light, which served to render entirely abstract the people, objects, and in this case also horses, in her photographs. Her visuals emphasized solely a romantic reading of these songs, and not their detached, cryptic meanings, and in this sense they were less critical and refined in their expression than Hugo Wolf’s complex musical rendering, as well as the performers’ sometimes almost painfully contorted faces.
While during the first night the question continually arose of who was stealing whose show, on the second evening the visuals by Claudia Rohrmoser had a surprisingly different effect on the settings and the songs, which drew on the works of Heinrich Heine, Lord Byron, Joseph von Eichendorff, Gottfried Keller, Niklaus Lenau and Michelangelo. The artist, who was the only one at the festival, apart from Victoria Coeln, to have experimented before with not only contemporary sounds but also the visualization of classical and so-called new music, made the contemporary relevance of her performance clear from the very first image. »Sie haben heut’ Gesellschaft« (They Have Company Coming This Evening) is the name of a poem by Heinrich Heine that speaks of a »house ablaze with light« and »bright windows.« Simultaneously, the screen showed the façade of a run-down apartment house as well as other everyday scenery, providing an intriguing contrast to the unfamiliar, sometimes capricious songs.

During the panel discussion in the course of the symposium »Quer,« Rohrmoser remarked that she was unsure whether her figurative experiment would work with Hugo Wolf. Usually, Rohrmoser uses abstract images, and indeed, these do seem the logical choice for these songs with their already supercharged imagery. She explained, however, that she wanted this time to create added value through the friction generated by her images instead of confronting the audience with pictures to match their ingrained ideas. If, for example, a poem used the word »flowers« to evoke certain visual associations, the artist presented a shot of a trashy floral print curtain fluttering in the wind – an image clearly located in the here and now, beyond the romance of forests and meadows. During more melodious passages, she instead showed pictures of embroideries, which served either as formal counterpart to the rhythm or evolved into figural images of lovers or short passages of the poems. By flouting the harmonious interplay of image and song, Rohrmoser created a kind of meta-text that was able to express in an unequivocal yet enriching way the insurmountable differences between Hugo Wolf’s worldview and contemporary visual culture.
The work of Tomas Novotny, who as a permanent member of Sofa Surfers has been producing their visuals for twelve years, shows how the artists’ different approaches incorporate the respective contexts in which they first developed their working methods. Accustomed to collaborations with musicians, the artist, who has also made feature-length films such as »Life in Loops,« designed his visuals for Hugo Wolf together with the curator Wolfgang Holzmair and the performers. He was assigned the »Italian Songbook,« which speaks of love, discord and reconciliation. Novotny chose two performers to be the protagonists of a travel story that took both the man and the woman to Italy, the man by airplane, the woman by train. The images depicted correspondingly differing perspectives and led high up into the clouds as well as showing the scenery on the ground. Similarly to Claudia Rohrmoser, Novotny interspersed such images with longer text passages written by hand. In this way, he paid respect to the text, emphasized crucial parts of the story and also gave the audience a chance to breathe, since they – evidently coming from different areas of experience in music and visuals – would no doubt have been challenged enough by this rather unusual medium.

The visuals by the artist duo sound:frame lab (Florian Launisch and Astrid Steiner) demonstrated that the 1:1 translation of club culture in the context of electronic music did not work at all in this setting, instead making the performers of the »Spanish Songbook« look like caricatures. In an approach that was simple and straightforward enough to suit a club atmosphere but failed to relate at all to the powerful Lieder and the utterly different context of the venue, trendy lifestyle images flickered across the screen, while in the foreground the singers endeavored to interpret Wolf’s very difficult tonal sequences with both their gestures and facial expressions. Although, like Claudia Rohrmoser, the artists of sound:frame had decided to make the images careen past the songs’ meanings, their work did not seem substantive enough, and was more akin to a random series of collages, with pictures of teenagers in hoodies and Japanese street scenes and script forming a sort of cluttered, starry sky.
The evening nevertheless clearly demonstrated the powerful impact of visuals on the setting – with differing degrees of success. And although Victoria Coeln is surely correct in her assertion that the perception of this »new format« also requires more practice on the part of audiences, in the course of the festival a quite simple question arose for viewers – whether the experiment worked or not.

In his foreword to the written program accompanying the evening, Christoph Thun-Hohenstein writes that visualization can be a way to spark younger audiences’ interest in challenging forms of music. While the absence of these youngsters from the nightclub scene at the festival meant that the desired diversity of different social backgrounds and generations was lacking, some of the visual experiments did prove successful not only with music enthusiasts but also with those interested in visuals.
One of the more intense works was the visualization by LIA, which relied on the abstract pictorial language the artist has already tested on multiple occasions with contemporary musicians. The idea here is to offer the audience room to make their own associations. The forms and colors the artist programmed using image-generating software to respond precisely to the music are clearly better suited to contemporary electronic sound. But they nonetheless received resounding applause from the audience at the RadioKulturhaus and the noteworthy festival appraisal »It works.«

lied lab 2010: hugo wolf festival, ORF RadioKulturhaus Vienna, 12 to 21 March 2010.

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor

 

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