ABSENCE REVERED

"Some may wonder about the "why and how” of my involvement in Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise.  The story is both simple and unexpected.  Two years ago the Intendant of the Deutsche Oper, had asked me if I would become involved in a production.  Of course, I immediately said yes – this without knowing what my task would be, or which opera would be staged.  The Intendant assumed that something along the lines of Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron would be my preference.  But I turned the question back to him.  Without hesitation he suggested Saint François.  This was a surprise to me on two counts: one, because I was not wholly familiar with the extraordinary musical score, and second, because the content was deeply religious.  It was then that I decided to create a non-representational interpretation that, through its own precision and logic would embody the spirit of a humanistic quest.

"Oddly enough, I had meditated and inscribed the name of St. Francis into the project entitled Three Lessons of Architecture, which I submitted to the Venice Biennale twenty years earlier.  I constructed the Writing Architecture Machine which was designed to generate a new understanding of the ever-living city.  This construction, a veritable spiritual experiment, involved reincarnating an experience of a medieval ascetic world, by constructing a machine in a monastic way, using no modern equipment, no electricity, but the discipline of craft, candlelight and the power of faith in the future text of architecture.  The machine dealt with the organized chaos in which permutations of names of saints, both true and apocryphal, emblems, reflections and cities were symbolically and physically made mobile by turning the 'circle into square'.  It took twenty eight simultaneous rotations to turn the machine’s faces toward the unexpected image of a reawakened site.  The fate of this machine was a sad one: it was destroyed in a fire in the old League of Nations building in Geneva after its showing in Venice.

"Ten years later, when I was designing what was to become the Exile Garden of the Jewish Museum Berlin, I felt it should be based on a 7x7, minus one, geometry.  This configuration referred to 48, as well as the one permanently missing name.  Indeed I did not only imagine this garden machine, but I actually drew it into the plans of the competition submission in the spring of 1989.  The Writing Architecture Machine and the garden relate directly to each other, in that each turn and re-turn of a surface connects itself with the dynamic of an invisible city.

"Similarly in response to Messiaen’s musical text, I used the text of architecture generated by the constellation of rotating cubes.  By moving the matrix of the 'foursome' as physical objects, I felt a connection with their "non-physical” presence.  Thus I understood that just because something is a non-existent reality, doesn’t obliterate the fact that it is a reality nevertheless.  The parallel yet independent relation between music/story and the architecturally spiraling score is for me the core of this fact.

"I have treated the opera architecturally as an extension of the Exile Project: a place for meditation, inquiry, analogy and paradox.  The whole task has been an unexpected adventure in which imagined shapes, rhythms, colors, chords, keys, surfaces and movements have opened a labyrinthine path toward a turbulent and strange peace.  A peace which even the final silence of the music cannot fill with the tranquillity of transcendence.

"All works produced through some form of love – an opera, a machine - cannot talk by themselves.  Their energy and substance come from an inside which is as obscure in origin as their external form.  I think that this Writing Architecture Machine gives the work of Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise a support which unpredictably yet structurally slopes, so that imagination could flow along it.  After all, why not?  The realm of creative participation allows one to experience a myriad of mysteries in a new space.  Perhaps the meaning of this performance is not created by single and disconnected anecdotes, but through the intensity of a quest which might have started on some Laputa, but ends by traversing the radiance of an ineffable Berlin.

Daniel Libeskind, June 2002

Translation by Bernhard Schneider.