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The Syntax Itself: Marko Nikodijević, Nikolaus Bachler and Olivier Renaud-Clément in conversation

Marko Nikodijević at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, December 2019. Photo: Wolfgang Stahr

  • Apr 11, 2020

I discovered the Serbian-born composer Marko Nikodijević more than a year ago at Teatro alla Scala in Milan. After an extraordinary interpretation of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 conducted by Teodor Currentzis, the orchestra performed an encore. The sheer expression of notes, sounds and percussions managed to prolong the intensity of Mahler’s composition. The audience was stunned.

The music gave me tremors but somehow provided me with a feeling of resolution at the same time. The piece, I found out later, was ‘GHB/tanzaggregat,’ Nikodijević’s 2011 work aptly named after a mind-altering drug popular in the techno scene. This obviously piqued my curiosity. Though the 40-year-old composer is impressively credentialed in classical music, having studied composition in Belgrade and in Stuttgart, where he now resides, his work often explores components of electronic music through classical structure and tonality. In the summer of 2018, Nikolaus Bachler, general manager of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, commissioned Nikodijević to collaborate with the pioneering performance artist Marina Abramović on ‘7 Deaths of Maria Callas,’ an opera project Abramović first conceived almost 30 years ago. Set to debut in Munich in April (then on to Florence, Athens, Berlin and Paris), the production will be comprised of seven arias that Callas performed, all featuring heroines who die for or from love: Tosca, Lucia, Butterfly, Carmen, Desdemona, Violetta and Norma. Abramović (as Callas) will appear in film and on stage during the performance, and Nikodijević will compose the music for the opera’s musical arrangement.

In my capacity as a founder of the International Friends of the Munich Opera, I traveled to Munich in December to speak to Bachler and Nikodijević about the project. These are edited and condensed portions of our conversation. —Olivier Renaud-Clément

Marina Abramović in a still from a film projected during the staging of 7 Deaths of Maria Callas. Photo: © Marco Anelli

Marina Abramović in a still from a film projected during the staging of 7 Deaths of Maria Callas. Photo: © Marco Anelli

Olivier Renaud-Clément: Nikolaus, can you tell me a bit about how ‘7 Deaths of Maria Callas’ came to be?

Nikolaus Bachler: The idea came when I met Marina Abramović in Denmark and asked her if she would like to direct Béla BartÓk’s ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’ [1911]. As we were talking, she told me that her dream had always been to make a film about Maria Callas and mortality. She sent me the script, and I said to her, ‘Could this not be for stage?’ She was immediately enthusiastic. The strength of Marina, of course, is in her action, not in her direction—the strength of Marina is Marina. We discussed how to include her in the piece, and we thought that if it were only Callas’ main arias, it would be a concert. To avoid that, I said, ‘You should be the center of the whole thing.’ So now the structure is, for the first part, she is onstage with seven singers while a series of films featuring Marina and Willem Dafoe [as Aristotle Onassis] are projected above. And for the second part, which is about the death of Callas, Marina is alone onstage, the set designed to look like Callas’ Paris apartment. Next, there was the question of who the composer should be. Since Teodor Currentzis was involved in the beginning, I wanted very much for him to do it. But I talked to him and realized the timing wouldn’t work. And so now, with Marko involved, there will be a new composition in the second part. And this, I have to say, I’m most excited about, because, as I imagine it, we will have, let’s say, Verdi’s ‘Traviata,’ and then comes the big boom, which goes in a completely different direction. Marko, have you seen the films yet?

Marko Nikodijević: No, not yet.

NB: Two or three are amazing, and the other ones are very good. So now I can imagine how the things will come together.

ORC: I first became interested in you, Marko, from the concert at La Scala, when Currentzis and the musicAeterna orchestra performed one movement of ‘GHB/tanzaggregat’ as an encore. It came out of nowhere, after all the applause. It was a musical revelation. Since I work mostly with visual artists, something I’d like to try to understand is your process of composition, how you create a piece of music.

MN: Well, you capture time—that is what composition is—and the sounds are the color in that time. That is the essence of music, capturing time and trying to make time timeless, or immortal.

ORC: You have a very interesting background. I understand you were a DJ…

MN: That came later. I started studying music as a child, which is one of the nice things about the East European school system; there are still state schools of music, so you can actually go to a kindergarten for music! My aunt is a music-history teacher, so before I could read, I knew that the blue LP was Beethoven and the green was Mozart. As a child, I would stand in front of the record player because the sound transfixed me. And so, after I finished my academic studies in composition, I sort of had a crisis. It was a combination of teenage angst and midlife crisis. I went from desirable to a has-been, which I now find refreshing—I’m really free. It’s fantastic.

ORC: Marko, this is the second time today that you’ve referred to yourself as old. [Laughs]

MN: I’m old in the way that I am still a creature of the last century, and I understand that a time is coming that I cannot comprehend fully. You see social changes and political changes and artistic changes, and you see a time coming that is not completely yours. It’s a dawn on the horizon.

NB: It’s yours in a different way. Your description of capturing time and filling that time is beautiful; it’s a very philosophical description for what music is. Do you think for Mozart it was the same?

MN: Well, we have to separate two things. It is also a menial job. It is not different than being a cook or a secretary. It is really a job where you sit down and do it.

NB: The handcraft part.

‘We evolved to hear things with a complexity of spatial resolution—we can tell if a bird is flying up or down!’ —Marko Nikodijević

MN: My favorite anecdote about Tchaikovsky, whom I adore, is that, for 40 years, he would wake up and eat his toast and drink his coffee—a rare Russian who liked drinking coffee in the morning!—and he’d write a fugue as a technical exercise. So, of course, you have to work on craft. The history of Western music is very interesting. It started with prayer chants, with the formulas at the end of those chants and listening to how well all the voices sounded in the church. They’d have cadences, and out of those cadences, ever more complex harmonic relations developed. And then those voices were moved around until they achieved counterpoint. Then instruments were introduced to those spaces and the virtuosity of instrumental play developed. Composers started pushing it ever more. So the complex cultural phenomenon that is Western music basically evolved over 900 years, completely separate from all kinds of other music-making: folk music, different types of ritual music we see in Africa or Tibet. But the one thing that the syntax of Western music has achieved is that it is able to assimilate everything. You can assimilate the didgeridoo into a symphony orchestra, and it won’t change the nature of it. It can pull everything into its context of meaning, which is why Western music achieved this kind of lingua franca. It is able to pull everything inside without changing the notion of the complex language it is in itself.

ORC: So within that, what is the ultimate form to you: the symphony, a sonata, an opera?

MN: That’s an interesting question, because these forms came as instruments were perfected. Then the tonal system fixed itself around what is harmonically possible, the temperament of the tones. The early pieces of music were usually a collection of dances; a typical suite in Baroque music is just a collection of dances that are simple forms—AA and AB, or A with a variation. Then the structural elements grew more complex—composers thought, ‘How can this syntax last longer?’ Of course, other cultural strains were happening at the same time: the Renaissance resurrection of the Greek idea of a staged music play, of opera; the monody, so that you have one voice singing with an accompaniment. At that point, you wouldn’t have an orchestra of 130 playing a symphony that’s 90 minutes long; 300 years were needed to achieve a musical syntax of that complexity, but in the end, it is really the syntax itself: How does a motif become a musical sentence? How does that sentence become a musical period, generating ever greater connective musical structures?

NB: Well, I think there is also a simpler explanation. The complexity of Baroque music, of music of the 19th century, is not more complex than the music of Monteverdi [1567–1643]. I think the big difference is that, until the 20th century, music had a certain purpose: to please the church or the person with the money. Composers had to find their way, or their genius, in the complexity within these constraints. From the 20th century on, we got so-called free time…

ORC: Ah, the bourgeois society.

Marko Nikodijević at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, December 2019. Photo: Wolfgang Stahr

MN: Well, it’s certainly true that the church and the nobility have more or less disappeared from public conscience. I mean, who had an orchestra and a choir? The church and the duke. When the bourgeoisie discovered that it could step into the role, music became more democratic. Something that fascinates me is that there is no silent culture on this planet. All cultures organize sound for ritualistic, spiritual or purely pleasure purposes.