Course and Dimensions of His Work

There is hardly another musician whose career is so difficult to outline. Klaus Huber’s is unusual because of its mix of tradition and a kind of modernity that is both relative and radical. Huber was connected to spiritual, political, and social causes throughout his life, as his music reflects. Although less known in France than some of his former pupils, he remained active in teaching and composing. His work, abundant and varied, embraces all genres, from solo pieces to operas.

The last decades of the twentieth century seem to have exhausted the question of art’s role, having obviously reached multiple dead ends. However overused the language around the role of art may seem today, the Swiss composer wanted this question to be central. “Unlike Adorno,” notes Brian Ferneyhough, one of Huber’s former students,

he [Huber] does not accept the agnostic view that the integral autonomy of the advanced art work is the necessary and sufficient guarantor of its authenticity. On the contrary, his Christian beliefs impel him to address directly what he sees as art’s utopian dual mission, to move the listener to concrete social reflection and embody a hope-filled vision of the just life.¹

Aligning more with Ernst Bloch than Adorno, Huber’s work engages with history: his music works constantly on the oppositions it inherits, refusing to set them aside. For Huber, a modernity based on a tabula rasa that wipes out human drama is no more acceptable than it is for Helmut Lachenmann or Luigi Nono. He also shared György Ligeti’s rejection of the idea of narrow and unidirectional progress in music. His work thus avoids any syncretism mixing humanism and modernity so that it can rather maintain a permanent tension between the two.

Like Nono, Huber rejected the concept of pure music; both composers incorporated pre-existing external elements into their compositions, often as a provocation. But his work also shows confidence in music’s capacity to produce meaning itself once it has assimilated the contexts of its production. By acknowledging and confronting historical contradictions, Huber progressed through successive breakthroughs, unexpected discoveries, and reconciliations marked by pivotal key works throughout his five-decade career:

1. Although he had received a traditional musical education, his music from the 1950s diverges from the trends of that time and indeed of much of the latter half of the twentieth century. In the midst of a period of generalized serialism, he wrote contemplative and mystical compositions, such as the chamber symphony Oratio Mechtildis (1957), the cantata Des Engels Anredung an die Seele (The Angel’s Address to the Soul, 1957), and Auf die ruhige Nachtzeit (To the Quiet Nighttime, 1959), which all seem to belong to a different era.
2. While he made several early attempts to use modern techniques, he only made significant progress between 1957 and 1964, though he still preserved his own style and ideas. The oratorio Soliloquia (1964) is a notable work, and his first breakthrough came later that year in the organ piece In te Domine speravi.
3. Between 1965 and 1967, temporal components emerged in Huber’s music, with pieces such as Tenebrae (1967), an orchestral work that depicts Christ on the cross. He achieved a second breakthrough in the lied with piano accompaniment Der Mensch (The Man, 1968), inspired by Friedrich Hölderlin.
4. Between 1969 and 1971, he developed a critical perception of time and a deeper understanding of engagement, as demonstrated in the violin concerto Tempora (1970) and the Apocalypse-inspired oratorio Inwendig voller Figur (Inside Full Figure, 1971). In 1972, he achieved a third breakthrough with Ein Hauch von Unzeit (A Touch of Untimeliness), for flute, piano, and a variable ensemble.
5. Over 1972 to 1975, he implemented open work processes and concepts, notably in the opera inspired by Alfred Jarry, Im Paradies oder der Alte vom Berge (In Paradise or the Old Man from the Mountain, 1975). He achieved the fourth breakthrough with the miniature piece Senfkorn (Mustard Seed) composed in 1975 for a child’s voice, oboe, string trio, and harpsichord. The lyrics include psalms by Ernesto Cardenal. The structure of the work foreshadows the next advances.
6. From 1975 to 1982 emerged oppositions and the monumental oratorio Erniedrigt-Geknechtet-Verlassen-Verachtet (Humiliated-Subjugated-Abandoned-Despised, 1982). A fifth breakthrough came in 1983 with Seht den Boden, blutgetränkt… (See the ground, soaked in blood), for fourteen instrumentalists. Here, his music began to confront and reconcile opposites. Other examples include his second string quartet Von Zeit zu Zeit (From Time to Time, 1985), Spes contra spem: A Counter-Paradigm on the Twilight of the Gods (1989), and La Terre des hommes (The Land of Men, 1989) for mezzo-soprano, countertenor, narrator, and eighteen instruments.
7. Starting in the 1980s, Huber showed interest in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance with compositions like Cantiones de Circulo gyrante (1985) and Agnus Dei cum Recordatione (1991). He also sought to integrate Asian and Arab musical and cultural influences. He continued his research on acoustic space, using differentiated sound spaces in Spes contra spem and Die umgepflügte Zeit (Time Plowed Up, 1990). He developed a system of harmony based on scales composed of third-tones, as appears in La Terre des hommes and as is facilitated by scordatura in the string trio Des Dichters Pflug (The Poet’s Plow, 1989).
8. In the 1990s, Huber studied the Arab theorists, whose influence is felt in Die Erde bewegt sich auf den Hörnern eines Ochsen (The World Turns on the Horns of an Ox, 1993). He engages with Carlo Gesualdo in Lamentationes sacrae et profanae ad responsoria lesualdi (1994) and Mozart in the string quintet Ecce homines (1998).
9. Huber’s works from the end of his career are intricate yet accessible, inclined toward intimate expression and mystical inspiration. While maintaining seamless continuity with his previous works, they introduce new harmonies that transcend diatonic and chromatic tonality. Huber accomplished this by successfully coordinating scales with temporal structures.

These milestones affirm a constant, which Huber’s music shares with that of Nono and Bruno Maderna: a critical attitude toward a modernity at odds with the past and tradition. This attitude manifests as he avoided any unifying trend in favor of keeping a diversity of original significations. His goal was to set to music both tradition and whatever the modern world was confronting: he conveyed this dramatic content and added his own utopian vision. He used various techniques to test and enhance these elements, without abstracting them from their original contexts. In his work, fragments and silence are not a renunciation of unity, but rather a torn portrayal of a wholeness to which spirituality still allows access. Although unity is frequently sensed and desired, it remains elusive, because of a higher order.

Huber challenged compositional techniques by juxtaposing them with tradition, often in an inverse relationship, as would Alban Berg or Bernd Alois Zimmermann. Like the works of Heinz Holliger, Huber’s create their own images of the past, engaging with folklore and Romantic-era music. They frequently cite other compositions, such as a passage from Berg’s Violin Concerto in Tempora, variations on Johannes Brahms’s Violin Concerto in Terzen-Studie (Thirds Study, 1958), the chaconne from Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas in Ein Hauch von Unzeit (A Touch of Untimeliness, 1972), and a tombeau by Sylvius Leopold Weiss in Erinnere dich an G… (Remember G…, 1977). Huber draws upon music from various historical periods in Turnus (1974) for orchestra, including the Notre-Dame School, Claudio Monteverdi, Anton Bruckner, and Béla Bartók. References to Johann Sebastian Bach dominate his works, especially Litania instrumentalis (1957), where the chorale Vaterunser im Himmelreich becomes modified and distorted, as is Bach’s aria Es ist vollbracht in Senfkorn and the chorale Christ ist erstanden in Tenebrae. In addition, Huber sometimes uses historical instruments, such as the viola d’amore in Plainte: À la mémoire de Luigi Nono (Complaint: In memory of Luigi Nono, 1990), the oboe d’amore and basset horn in Spes contra spem, and the lute and hurdy-gurdy in Agnus Dei cum Recordatione.

Huber’s music incorporates diverse texts, from biblical and medieval mystical writings to contemporary resistance and philosophical literature. Though not always originating from traditional literature, all texts were chosen for their musical suitability. Frequently, multiple languages or texts from several different writers are used within one piece, such as Erniedrigt-Geknechtet-Verlassen-Verachtet and …Ausgespannt… (…Unclamped…, 1972). Huber aimed to preserve diverse cultural identities within a network in which music is only one element, though a crucial one: this approach gives a first chance to the musical work. Various authors are sources of inspiration, including Cardenal, Mahmoud Darwish, Jacques Derrida, Rosa Luxemburg, Osip Mandelstam, Johann Baptist Metz, Pablo Neruda, Friedrich Nietzsche, Octavio Paz, Rainer Maria Rilke, Nelly Sachs, Dorothee Sölle, Simone Weil, and Peter Weiss.

Huber frequently described his approach to incorporating musical excerpts and texts into his works as “transubstantiation.” Such a relationship to the text and music can be found in Senfkorn, which is built around the aria from Bach’s cantata BWV 159: there jointly appears a pre- or de-figuration of the aria and a logogenetic or textual trope, that is to say the substitution of one text for another on similar music. He incorporates texts in a way similar to Cardenal’s Salmos, which reinterprets biblical psalms to reflect contemporary context and language. While Nono did not always include texts in his works (they sometimes appeared as epigraphs), Huber used them to structure and shape his compositions. His alteration of Bach’s aria in Senfkorn did not make it more accessible, but it instead paradoxically increased its “aesthetic distance” (to use a term coined by Hans Robert Jauss) from the original music. The fact that the aria underlies the music gives it an “earth-shattering” effect, as Huber himself remarked. Thus, he successfully transformed a parable of the Kingdom of God on earth into music.

Agnus Dei cum Recordationeis based on a mass by Johannes Ockeghem and uses similar literary techniques that are sometimes hard to trace. Huber took a text by Gösta Neuwirth, translated it into French, and then had Pierre Bec convert it to fifteenth-century French. The final version is not just a retranslation, but a fictional one, because Neuwirth’s original is a montage of various texts, including quotes from Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges. Similar elements appear in Intarsi (1994) but on the level of the music rather than text, as Huber incorporates the songFaire reverdir les arbres (Make the Trees Green Again) referenced by Mozart in the third movement of his piano concerto K. 595.

Going beyond European musical and literary practices, Die Erde bewegt sich auf den Hörnern eines Ochsen uses Arabic tonal scales and responds to a historical, as well as musical, context by incorporating elements “foreign” to European culture and reciting in four languages a discourse by an Iranian poet. The text Huber chose is a sharp critique of the degradation of cultures through their importation. But the work also highlights commonalities between European and Arabic musical traditions, and the text would endorse the moral integrity of this act.

Huber’s Des Dichters Pflug and Senfkorn are structured by Mandelstam’s poems and Cardenal’s psalms, respectively, in contrast to Nono’s string quartet Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima, where Hölderlin’s poetry is read and sung in resonant fragments. However, the use of the text as a framing device suggests that the composition is still a work in progress.

In Bach’s music, Huber observed a “conflict” between madrigalian formulas and constructive ideas, which results in a deeper exploration of the relationship between text and music. When he affirms that “there is no opposition between construction and expression” and that “form has a spoken dimension,” he points to the possibility of a “transubstantiation” that is able to concretely actualize history. He emphasizes that this “degradation” is intrinsically musical. Figurative music, which avoids becoming fixed or reduced to an absolute, challenges Adorno’s ideas about music from the 1950s and ’60s, and even the ideas of modern music in general. To quote Martin Kaltenecker,

Huber’s music is miraculous in that it could develop against its own aesthetic principles. Analogical thinking neither stifled the artist’s imagination nor hindered the advancement of his musical ideas. It never renounces complexity, but places it not at the composition’s source, but at a later stage of development and deployment.²

For Huber, radicalizing modernity did not mean sterilizing the musical work and blindly serving the alienation that threatens it. Rather, it meant taking the risk of expanding music to what it is supposed to reject. Huber represents this paradox while resisting the artificial distortions that art sometimes creates in its thirst for artistic purity. His music tirelessly and obstinately endeavors to transform this despondent human world of perpetual exile into a realm of creation.³

<sup>1. Brian FERNEYHOUGH, “Portrait Klaus Huber,” klaushuber.com (accessed 16 May 2023). ↩
2. See full text here. ↩
3. All of Klaus Huber’s scores and related documents are kept at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. The author of this article, Raphaël Brunner, expresses his sincere gratitude to the Foundation for allowing him to consult the collection multiple times and for allowing him to conduct his research. ↩</sup>