ABSTRACT
Trying to write about the ironies that can happen in opera performances is obviously tricky enough, as the last chapter illustrated, but at least there exist narrative texts—libretti, programs—to provide an expanded context. In the case of instrumental music, the difficulties in attributing irony would seem even more problematic: there are often no words (beyond the title) or other handy hermeneutic helpers within the piece, though there may be program notes to read before listening. Take, for instance, Walter Boudreau’s Berliner Momente, Zweiter Teil, a work recently commissioned by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Boudreau is a Canadian, but has written a number of compositions “about” Berlin. According to his own account— and now we enter the realm of intention—the first, Berliner Momente, Erster Teil (1988) was a musical response to 33 key events in Berlin’s thousand-year history. The second part addressed the things that had occurred since 1988: the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the fall of communism in East Germany, and the subsequent reunification of the country. Music cannot say this directly, of course; Boudreau must rely (as Kiefer does) upon his audience’s ability to recognize certain things—here, at the very least, both the German national anthem (Haydn’s Austrian imperial hymn) and Wagner’s theme from the death of Siegfried in Götterdämmerung—and then begin to make meaning out of his compositional play with them. One might argue that this music is well known to certain audiences, but it is significant that, when the work premiered in the fall of 1991, Boudreau chose to speak to his Toronto audience before the performance, explaining the historical events that had inspired him and the musical allusions upon which he had constructed his composition.
