Any chance of a mid-term update?

That's very considerate of you, Ollie!

It's true, I suppose, that one of the things I'll have to have dealt with by the time I get to writing my review is the sheer quantity of verbiage around the piece, both on these boards and elsewhere. I say this not as a complaint -- I'm not the kind of person to make simplistic dichotomies of 'music' and 'words about music', 'the piece' and 'interpretation(s) of it', etc. etc. -- but I've never written at any length about Richard's music before and it will be interesting to see whether I can find room in my 600 words to try and develop at least the beginnings of an original perspective on it, and that'll be an added challenge given how full my head currently is of what RB, Ian, yourself, and Peter McCallum have said about Opening.

Hello Tommo, I don't think it's really appropriate for me to comment too much, except to say that the performers without exception played with a degree of commitment, enthusiasm and virtuosity that one doesn't often meet with, especially in such an extensive and challenging work and with musicians who were mostly unfamiliar to me. In other words, a big BRAVO to all concerned, and also a more personal but just as big THANKS for breathing life into the music in such a concentrated and moving way.

Well, as long as it wasn't a beguilingly triumphant vindication.  A word that I had just proofed and sent off to those same august Tempo columns at the time of the unanimous condemnation of said word on the old R3 boards... hmm...

It's a shame UMP don't sell the CD anymore, considering that practically no one else does either. ELISION do have a somewhat troubled history when it comes to the commercial accessibility of their CDs, don't they.

Regarding the clearly somewhat unwelcome political debate, I'll say this much: having engaged in some depth with Celan's work for the last 11 years, I'm greatly displeased to see how it's been appropriated by certain somewhat conservative American academic circles, as in Felstiner's case. While his biography is excellent in many respects, I don't like the way it makes Celan a "Jewish Poet" first and foremost. He goes into enough depth about various aspects of Jewish tradition to avoid reducing him to a "Holocaust Poet", thankfully, but to me his portrayal creates a certain impression of an artist meant for a certain clientèle, which is the last thing Celan was after. I don't think it's so productive to look at Celan's thoughts on Israel in the light of contemporary knowledge and events, as I'm certain he knew nothing about the oppression and dispossession of Palestinians and his view was inevitably going to be a very emotional and idealised one as a result of his traumatic experiences. It's obvious that he was referring to the Six Day War, I don't see any need for debate on that. But that doesn't make him in any way complicit with the cynical expansionism that's become clearer since then. I'd sooner say that one should simply be aware of appropriation attempts from different quarters.

Maybe I'm a bit thick, but I don't get what you mean about at least two senses.

As for your second statement, that's rather at odds with his own characterisation of his poetry as a message in a bottle.

Well, of course not! That would obviously go against all things Celanian. But your comment that "you don't read his poetry, it reads you" seems to suggest a certain solipsistic monologue character, rather than the "Flaschenpost" which is sent to some reader, some listener somewhere. Celan doesn't know who will find the bottle, whether the message will be comprehensible - and I DON'T mean in some unequivocal way - or what will happen to it, but he definitely was after some sort of dialogue. I don't know if you actually suggested otherwise, but that's what it sounded like.

"La poésie ne s'impose plus, elle s'expose"...

Not that Celan's word on the subject is in any case necessarily the last one.

I thought I was suggesting exactly what you've just said. Apologies if that was unclear. What I meant by 'it reads you' is that my experience in reading Celan's poetry (for what it's worth, which is exceedingly little) has been not so much of me interrogating a poem for its meaning as of a poem investigating me for my receptivity. I suspect Celan's frequent use of 'you' has something to do with that. It wasn't intended as a particularly profound comment, nor as a universally applicable observation.

Ah, here it is. From his speech accepting the Bremen Literature Prize.

Das Gedicht kann, da es ja eine Erscheinungsform der Sprache und damit seinem Wesen nach dialogisch ist, eine Flaschenpost sein, aufgegeben in dem - gewiß nicht immerhoffnungstarken - Glauben, sie könnte irgendwo und irgendwann an Land gespült werden, an Herzland vielleicht. Gedichte sind auch in dieser Weise unterwegs: sie halten auf etwas zu.

Er, something like, "the poem, since it is a manifestation of language and thus by its very nature a dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, cast out in the - certainly not hopeful - belief that it could somewhere, at some time, wash up on the shore, the shore of the heart perhaps. Poems are also in this manner underway: they are directed somewhere".

On the other hand there's also

Das hundert-züngige Mein-Gedicht, das Genicht.

Forget where that comes from. "The hundred-tongued [my-poem / perjury-poem], the noem". A less cheerful formulation.