Date of composition: 1925-1927
Premiere: in its original version on 8 April 1927 at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, USA, by the Philadelphia Orchestra, conductor: Leopold Stokowski
Duration: 16 minutes
Performances by the Berliner Philharmoniker:
first performed in its original version on 5 March 1932 under the direction of Nicolas Slonimsky and on 21 June 1965 in the revised version with the conductor Lukas Foss
The Latin word “arcana” is the plural of “arcanum,” which translates to secret or hidden knowledge. The title, therefore, promises unheard-of things in the realm of music – typical of the French composer Edgard Varèse, who was constantly in search of novelty. At the same time, it contains a reference to the work of Paracelsus. This 16th-century physician and alchemist understood “arcanum” to mean the hidden forces of nature, which could be unlocked through systematic exploration. Among other things, he was concerned with dosage, which could turn a poison into a remedy, as well as with a particular composition of blood that might be used to create an artificial human being. Varèse found this connection intriguing enough to preface the score of Arcana with a quote from Paracelsus, establishing a link between speculative astronomy and artistic inspiration: “There is one star, higher than all the others. This is the star of the Apocalypse. The second star is the ascendant. The third is that of the elements, which are four in number. There are therefore six firmly established stars. In addition, there is another star, the imagination, which produces a new star and a new sky.”
Varèse had a penchant for such lofty ideas. After his studies and early demonstrations of talent, he moved from Paris to Berlin in 1907, where he met the German-Italian musician Ferruccio Busoni. Varèse was inspired by Busoni’s essay Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music, in which Busoni dreamed of an entirely different kind of music, detached from the tonal harmonic system, for instruments that had not yet been invented. Varèse took up this idea by incorporating sound generators in some of his works that had never before been used in classical orchestras – sirens, for instance, in Amériques and Ionisation.
Arcana, composed between 1925 and 1927 and revised in 1960, broadens the perspective to include the cosmic. In this piece, Varèse explored the realm of dreams, convinced that art originates from the unconscious rather than reason. These elements were meant to carve their own path in his music: during composition, Varèse tried to sense in which direction his invented themes wanted to develop. “I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena,” he later said. “As a child, I was tremendously impressed by the qualities and character of the granite I found in Burgundy, where I often visited my grandfather.” This material quality on one hand and the spiritual on the other are the poles between which his music unfolds. Alternating between the concrete and the visionary, the themes introduced initially reappear time and again, in whole or in part, building up in waves to the highest tension before collapsing in catastrophic clusters. The apocalypse is always near. At the very end, the music turns towards the mysteriously celestial.