Heiner Goebbels

Stifters Dinge is the sound of one of Heiner Goebbels' strangest stage works, a piece he once called a composition for five pianos with no pianists, a play with no actors, "one might say a no-man show." It takes its title and its patient attention to natural phenomena from the 19th century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter. Heard on disc, without the machinery in view, it becomes a 62-minute composition in which mechanised pianos, archival voices and the sound of water carry the whole drama.

Goebbels unveiled the work at the Théâtre Vidy in Lausanne in September 2007. At its centre are five grand pianos, nested together and stood on end, equipped to sound from inside and outside and to play whole pieces like player pianos, the construction moving on rails over pools of water. Klaus Grünberg designed set, light and video, Willi Bopp handled sound design and recording, and Hubert Machnik worked on programming. This recording was made on 20 and 21 October 2007 at the Grand Théâtre de la Ville de Luxembourg, as a co-production of ECM and SWR Baden-Baden. Goebbels edited and mixed it with Max Federhofer, with Manfred Eicher as executive producer.

The twelve sections carry plain elemental titles such as The Fog, The Salt and The Storm, and much of the material returns in cycles of small fragments and pulses. In The Rain the voice of Claude Lévi-Strauss, interviewed by Jacques Chancel for Radio France in 1988, meets the slow movement of Bach's Italian Concerto played by the unattended keyboards. The Thunder sets a television interview with Malcolm X from the early 1960s against William S. Burroughs reading from Nova Express. The Coast draws on the Greek song Kalimérisma, sung by Ekateríni Mangoúlia in a 1930 recording made by Samuel Baud-Bovy. Elsewhere the actor Bill Paterson reads Stifter in English.

Presented from London to New York to Melbourne, the staging had passed 250 showings by the time of release and won the Grand Prix Mira Trailovic at the Bitef Festival in Belgrade in 2008. Andrew Clements in The Guardian described the moving wall of pianos as "Totally mesmerizing." Reviewing the CD, Dominy Clements of MusicWeb International heard echoes of Conlon Nancarrow in El Sonido and called it "a remarkable and surprisingly rich and stimulating work." Ivan Hewett in BBC Music Magazine was more reserved, missing the visuals and finding the music thin at moments.

CD, ECM New Series 2216, first released on 25 May 2012, with liner notes by Wolfgang Sandner in German and in English translation by Paul Griffiths.