introduction texts
Marianne
Korporal, alias Mahlerianne
Ricardo de Mambro Santos
The
works that comprise The Song of the Earth of Marianne Korporal do
not intend to illustrate some of the most suggestive passages of
Mahler’s musical production, from The Songs of a Wayfarer to the magisterial symphonic orchestrations. If we compare
the musical paradigm of Gustav Mahler — mighty
and incisive, gently omnipresent — and the pictorial creations of
Marianne Korporal — captured
in a world interpenetrated by primal forms, by archetypes and original
elements ready to articulate themselves as traces of a different reality,
containing experiences both new and already known — we do not verify
an inflexible inventive predetermination, nor a risky comparison of
themes and experiences. Each artist uses the language that is specific
for his or her own grammatical and syntactical origins, proposing an
individual re-codification: Mahler certainly does not limit himself in
his references to Beethoven, to Wagner and to medieval Chinese poetry,
but these references play a discernable and necessary role in his music.
Equally, in the monumental sequence of The Song of the Earth,
Marianne refers intentionally to archetypal images of unequivocal
oriental origin, choosing an admirably calibrated range of tonality,
from the enfolding warmth of the red, the brown and the ochre to the
evanescent and frozen coldness of the blue applied on the background,
meant to outline the remote concreteness of mountains. Put together in
their pregnant semantic relationship both artistic interpretations meet
each other by way of intense lyric exploration of the world, a way
marked by continuous overlap and afterthoughts, by new strategies and
recoveries. Therefore, Mahler and Marianne work out a decisive
restoration, a well-considered sentimental and conceptual revision,
capable of depicting the world and the “being
there” in their state of promising possibility, in the fragile
— but unbreakable — contemporary presence of colors and sounds,
senses and forms, predicted before the definitive rise of language.
The compositions of Marianne Korporal can be characterized as the simultaneous, not synchronous, development of an initial story, of a starting point which is elusive, but reconstructable according to the poetic directions that we see on the pictorial surface. From the aching vitality of the Song of Lament to the sad waiting of the Songs on the Death of Children, and the admirable representation of absence in the work Now I see well why with such dark flames, the works of Marianne unfold with the outbursting consequence of kinetic images, imparting to each panel the dense and suspended song of its own pictorial musicality. In this context of decisive liberation from the formalities of a “symbolic narrative”, touchingly replaced by a “silent symbolism”, the works of Marianne — alias, Mahlerianne — propose, in the Symphonies, a paradigmatic aesthetic development. Distant from the vibrating and vigorous, full-bodied and violent brushstrokes of the first Symphonies — still referable to the exasperating and lacerating dictum of the expressionist avant-garde — the following more abstract works (the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Symphonies) have the tendency to melt themselves into the more delicate and compact order of dynamic compositions with cosmic value. The final works reach the distant horizons (“blauen licht die Fernen”), the geometric silence, the crepuscular song of a birth, the balanced dawn of an absence: the rephrasing ability of art. From the laceration to the death, from the disappearance to the presence, the images of Marianne show the inexorable signs of a struggle, of a perennial fight: “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” (“I have lost touch with the world”).
translated by Maria
Korporal,
revised by Stan Ruttenberg (president Colorado
MahlerFest) and Patricia Ruttenberg
Inspiration - Gerrit Van Oord
Marianne Korporal alias Mahlerianne - Ricardo de Mambro Santos
Mahler, Cantor of the "Crisis" - Giorgio Boari Ortolani
Gustav Mahler - biography
Maria Korporal - biography