BERLINER MOMENTE
Walter Boudreau composed Berliner Momente between July and November 1988. He selected thirty-three key events from Berlin's thousand-year history (from 988 to 1988), and distilled them into a sixteen-minute composition. The entire work plays on two musical themes: the German national anthem (the Austrian imperial hymn composed by Haydn), and the theme of Siegfried's death from Wagner's Twighlight of the Gods. The composer juxtaposes the two themes, creates conflict between them, and transforms them by artfully contracting and expanding their tempos and intervals. The result is not so much a collage as an intensive paraphrasing of the melodies, to the point of their virtual submergence in the passage for two vibraphones towards the middle of the piece.
Every few bars of the score correspond to a specific history event, all of them setting the stage first for World War I, then for World War II and the death of the German nationalist dream. For Walter Boudreau, the destiny of the German people has been essentially tragic, and he concluded his piece on an unresolved chord, symbolizing the Cold War. Berliner Momente was commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
