Heinz-Klaus Metzger
To watch television for an evening with the eyes and ears of Heinz-Klaus Metzger must be twice as painful as it otherwise is. Still today, his lecturers and essays are a lonely struggle against the “prevailing idiocy . . . that oozes from the loudspeakers and shimmers on the screens,” a passionate cry against alliances of “stupidity” and “marketability” that make the art of existence in autonomous realms ever more difficult. “The smoldering fire that is gradually attacking the foundations of tolerance for all autonomy is by now burning in all institutions,” he stated in 2005 in a lecture “on several facets of adversity to autonomy.” What is his diagnosis of the present a few years later? Growing up a child of Nazi parents, he received a musical education at an elite boarding school in Germany. Aware of the horrors of Nazi rule, he participated with real interest and eagerness in the innovations of the post-war avant-garde, in which the longing for innovation was coupled with a desire to make a clean slate of the past. Heinz-Klaus Metzger was forced to experience how his comrades in 1968 stigmatized high culture as elitist, while at the same time with the demand for “political art” burying the demands of autonomy and freedom. But he heroically maintained this concept of art. As an openly gay man, the dissent with society that he demanded of art has surely been one of the existential experiences that shaped his own biography. “Art, at any event, is adverse to reality, just as reality is adverse to art.” Heinz-Klaus Metzger must have spent one of the most uncomfortable nights of his life in the bathtub of Mary Bauermeister’s studio in the early 1960s in Cologne, just after Nam June Paik next door had destroyed a piano in honor of John Cage. But even then, he used the historical impossibility of writing manifestos as on occasion to formulate manifestly. In so doing, he has remained a utopian until today, and the audience is still awaiting for his demand to be fulfilled that “doors of the concert hall be pushed open from the inside, and that the conductors outside in the world that command according to a very different score get abolished with just as much verve,” as they are in the scores and the work of John Cage. Heinz-Klaus Metzger, in contrast to Theodor W. Adorno, with whom he so enjoyed to argue, experienced not only the aging of new music, but also the aging of the most recent music, and still does so today, for he, born in 1932, has not remained the youngest. He remains true to an old question: “Why music?” In the book series Musik-Konzepte, which he edited for many years together with Rainer Riehn, he considered no musical subject of interest to be self-evident, and was always looking for ever new answers to his chosen life subject. That he might be right in his view that the truth demands of art can still be technically, immanently determined is the wish of many, even if they no longer can ignore the economic imperative. But their exclamation points seem small compared to Heinz Klaus Metzger’s call for autonomy.