Max Knigge: ‘We live in an artistically free era, you’re allowed to do whatever you want as a composer’
Composer Max Knigge wrote Eliza May for the Residentie Orkest, which will premiere on Friday evening, October 10th, at Amare.
Max, who is Eliza May?
“Eliza May Drayden is the central character in the novel ‘het lied van ooievaar en dromedaris’ by Anjet Daanje. She’s inspired by Emily Brontë, the author of Wuthering Heights. The remarkable thing is: Eliza May doesn’t speak at all in Daanje’s book. She’s already dead when the novel begins. Her life and work serve as a starting point to reflect on various themes through other characters and stories. The book is incredibly rich and layered, you’re drawn into one world after another. Each time you think: this is the core, only to encounter another profound truth in the next chapter. You could say that each moment itself becomes the most important.”
What role does Eliza May play in all of that?
“She’s absent, yet after her death she becomes almost a kind of spiritual force. People feel they can talk to her, as if Eliza May has looked into the depths of their soul. It’s fascinating how someone can be so claimed and shaped after death. The book deals with loneliness, sisters, the role-playing in social interaction, gossip, the Yorkshire landscape. And death is a connecting thread. Death as a concrete event, which in the nineteenth century was a constant looming presence. That’s a grim idea, but death is also the engine of existence, the event that puts life into perspective. Eliza May expresses it beautifully in her fictional novel Haeger Mass: ‘For a fraction of a second I saw the inhuman reality in which we found ourselves, the constant looking back, returning, redistributing that is called Life, a game of musical chairs that ends dizzyingly in the cradle of Death.’”
How did you translate all of that into music?
“The book is so vast, I’d ideally turn it into an opera, or a cycle of operas over five evenings. My solution was to pretend I had actually created that cycle, and then compile a suite from those imaginary operas. Though I don’t think it would be a good idea to turn this novel into an opera, because a good opera needs minimal text and archetypal characters to allow for musical depth. This is truly a book-book.”
What’s the structure of the suite?
“It consists of five movements, played consecutively to form a single arc. Five is an important number in the book, it appears on nearly every page. The movements are about the hill that represents heaven for Eliza May, the textile factory that stands as hell on earth, and the post office where villagers meet to gossip. The portrait of the village and its inhabitants, how people talk and think about each other and themselves, and thereby shape their reality, is one of the most fascinating aspects of the novel.”
How would you describe your music?
“We live in an artistically free era, you’re allowed to do whatever you want as a composer. Art is a game, and you can only play a game if there are rules. It took me a while to admit to myself what I really want to create: music that sounds pleasant, but that also clashes when needed for dramatic effect. A bit like how Anjet Daanje uses postmodern elements to tell her story. I think my music is eclectic, but in a coherent way.”
Anjet Danjel is a literary hero. Who are your musical heroes?
“First and foremost, Mozart. He’s often seen as ‘light,’ but that’s a shallow judgment. I experience the deepest musical emotions in his work. Debussy is a major influence, not just for me; I can point out exactly where his influence shows up in many colleagues’ work. Among contemporary composers, I enjoy listening to Ligeti and Dusapin. And I’m also very fond of psychedelic pop from the late 1960s, that’s a real obsession of mine.”