The cello was like a spouse to me, Isang Yun says in one of the tape recordings of 1976. Of his cello concerto of 1975/76 he explained: since the cello had been my favourite instrument from my youth, I took it as the centre. He regarded the instrument as his own beautiful, weak voice, confronted with the dramatic, destructive world. That this most autobiographical of Yun’s instruments stands at the centre of the anniversary production is fitting, Holger Groschopp says in conversation with Mirjam Wiesemann.
The sequence of works on the first two SACDs resembles a portrait sketch: a few strokes that capture the impression of a personality. It leads to various stations in Yun’s output — from Nore for cello and piano (1964, revised 1968) and the Five Pieces for Piano (1958) through Shao Yang Yin, written for harpsichord in 1966 and heard here in Kaya Han’s piano version, the four Glissées for solo cello (1970), the Interludium A for piano (1982), the Duo for cello and harp (1984) arranged for cello and piano and the Intermezzo for cello and accordion (1988), to Espace I (1992) and the Seven Studies for solo cello of 1993, one of his last works. Adele Bitter and Holger Groschopp, who met Isang Yun in 1982 at the study week for young composers in Hilchenbach, recorded them in 2017 at the Erholungshaus der BAYER AG in Leverkusen.
Born in Korea in 1917, Yun went to Europe in 1956, studied in Paris and Berlin and developed a language of his own out of eastern and western influences. Every listener sees my position between East and West differently, and that is as it should be, he told Luise Rinser: you can hear my music one way or the other, as eastern or as western. That this is possible defines exactly where I stand. At the end of his life he could say: the division within me is completely overcome — while he suffered until the end from the division of Korea. In 1963 he travelled to North Korea to see the tomb frescoes of the sixth and seventh centuries that mattered so much to his thinking; that journey contributed to his abduction from West Berlin to Seoul by the South Korean secret service in June 1967.
The spoken parts come from two sources. In May 1993 Yun gave lectures at the Mozarteum in Salzburg; the excerpts deal with the significance of the single note in Europe and Asia, with Taoism, with microcosm and macrocosm — music is not to be composed but to be given birth to — and with his own insight: I wanted to compose on the European model, that was completely wrong. The original recordings, in three parts, come from conversations that Luise Rinser taped in Yun’s house in Berlin-Kladow in the autumn of 1976. In them Yun recounts his life: the war orphans in Busan, the tuberculosis, the first meeting with his future wife Soo-Ja, the birth of his children, the departure for Europe, Paris, Berlin — and the abduction, from its very first moment.
The fourth SACD closes with the conversation Mirjam Wiesemann recorded with Holger Groschopp on 22 March 2018 in Isang Yun’s house in Berlin-Kladow. All the historical recordings were restored at the Cybele Studios in 2019.