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Karl-Birger Blomdahl: “Mima-tape 1”
From the opera Aniara (1959)
I’m still reeling a bit from my recent discovery of the world’s first space-opera, written by Swedish composer Karl-Birger Blomdahl in the late 50s and premiered in 1959. It is based on the “epic science fiction poem” Aniara by the Nobel Prize winner Harry Martinson.
“Earth, become unclean / with toxic radiation, is accorded / a time of calm, repose and quarantine”: A group of refugees abandons the threatened planet and boards the spaceship Aniara, “and like a giant pupa without weight, / vibrationless, Aniara gyrates clear / and free of interference out from Earth.” But a near-collision with an asteroid throws the ship off course, and its denizens confront an endless voyage into uncharted space. They are saved from total despair by the Mima, a quasi-sentient computer worshiped by the passengers of Aniara for its ability to project “images / and tongues and scents from undiscovered countries.” Soon the voyagers receive the news of the annihilation of “Dorisvale” (Earth); Mima, who had “beheld the granite’s white-hot weeping / when stone and ore were vaporized to mist,” could not bear the trauma of witnessing the Earth’s demise, and self-destructs. All this in the first 30 pages!
The musical idiom generally resembles the “international style” of postwar modernism: Blomdahl based the composition of the opera on an “all-interval” twelve-tone row. But there is a refreshing variety to the music, as represented by jazzy-dissonant dance-hall pieces and solemn choral movements. In its stylistic diversity, Aniara anticipates the much better-known modernist opera Die Soldaten, composed around the same time, but not premiered until 1965.
For the scenes depicting the Mima, Blomdahl composed three electronic pieces he called “Mima-tape.” These are among the first electronic works created in Sweden, and, with the exception of Jörg Mager’s creation of synthetic bell sounds for a 1931 production of Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal, perhaps the first use of electronic sounds in the history of opera.
The form of “Mima-tape 1” is loose and episodic. A series of short sound-vignettes evokes the phantasmagoric projections of the Mima, which culminate with the live broadcast of Earth’s destruction.
The following fragments can perhaps be distinguished in this ‘sound-play,’ based on certain keywords, lines or moods in Harry Martinson’s epic: The song of the light years and cosmos—the key to the mystery seen as through walls of mountainous-deep space crystal… Evil reports penetrate space, the storm of dark rays from distant voids… Glimpses of the true light of solace. Veils of dreams… Death plays chess with infinity… Fire and death ravage the Earth.
Played 75 time(s).
October 11, 2009, 5:25pm
