DESCRIPTION:
Inane, soliloquy for soprano and orchestra (1968)

Joan Carroll, soprano

Symphonieorchester Des Bayerischen Rundfunks, München
Andrzej Markowski

In 1968 a vocal opus of great peculiarity and dramatic character originated: Inane, soliloquy for soprano and orchestra. It had been commissioned by SFB, a Berlin radio station, for Joan Carroll, the American opera singer living in Germany, who sang the part in the premiere in Berlin in January of 1969. The Latin title means "emptiness" or "cavity". The text by Manuel Thomas deals with a very serious subject: the psychic condition of a woman whose baby is removed before delivery. In its mixture of anguish, pain, rage, and remembrance it is a parallel to Erwartung by Arnold Schonberg to the text of Marie Pappenheim. And the score of Reimann in its expressionist spirit also is indebted to this monodrame of the year 1909. It obviously restrains in favour of the solo part the sound of the orchestra broken up in many ways, an emotional and strangely scanned prose of the winds and the multitone chords of the low strings. The two artists wrote: "Inane would not have originated without Joan Carroll. Only her personality in which the most diverse inspirations and means of art coexist side by side caused us to write a piece for her in which all her capabilities were to be utilized."

The text with its alternating dramatic and lyric heights and lows has been set to music for her. In it there are naive folk tunes alongside with hysterical declamations, dramatic outbursts like the one in front of the empty bed and when seeing letters from the beloved, grimacing passages like the one spoken at a high pitch of the nocturnal thief with sustained chords and jazz-like pizzicati of the double-basses, powerful increases in volume and nuances fading away. In this pandemonium Miss Carroll raged and belcantoed with a convincing inner commitment.
--H. H. Stuckenschmidt

Art by Joaquín Jara