At the beginning stands a poem: Un coup de dés by Stéphane Mallarmé, laid out across eleven double pages. Mallarmé’s own preface does not aim to explain the poetry — at most it can awaken a readiness to engage with it, since letting oneself be captured by the words can happen only through the poetry itself. For the twenty-year-old Mallarmé poetry was already something inexplicable: in his article Hérésies artistiques. L’art pour tous he describes it as a mystery comparable only to the religions. Hardly any other text bears that out as this poem does, which plunges the reader into a labyrinth of bewildering darkness — composed like a virtual score that cannot be read in the usual way.
Denhoff’s original idea was to set at least parts of Mallarmé’s text for a twelve-strong ensemble of three sopranos, three flutes, three clarinets and three cellos. But even as he began to engage more deeply with Un coup de dés, it was clear to him that this would require a complementary cycle of purely instrumental, commenting pieces to prepare that setting and accompany the undertaking. Thus the twelve quartets came about — like twelve musical steps towards Mallarmé’s poetry.
Selected segments of the “word score” become the starting point for musical reflections that point back to their literary origin and yet, through transposition into another artistic medium, gain a formal autonomy of their own. The cycle does not aim to illustrate the text acoustically: it picks out single configurations and tries, in this form of dissecting approach, to imagine the whole — through allusions, paraphrases and hinted-at moods. Composing along the text is in any case ruled out by Un coup de dés, as is a setting in the traditional sense.
Each of the quartets stands on its own in its particular sonority, yet corresponds with the others through subterranean lines of connection. The musical text is exactly fixed, but the direction of listening remains conditionally open: six possible arrangements of the quartets are provided, and which one applies is decided before the performance by a throw of the dice. In numerical order each quartet brings a progressively gradual, circular change of timbre, since one musician steps down and the next joins — so every musician plays four of the twelve quartets.
To describe this music’s vocabulary explanatorily and to uncover the correspondences with Mallarmé’s poetry would, by Denhoff’s own account, miss its purpose: its statement cannot and will not be unambiguous, it is not fixed one-dimensionally but remains open and suspended in what it sets in motion in the listener. It would like to give away its secret, but not entirely. The live recording of 23 February 2000 from the Technologiezentrum in Duisburg-Neudorf runs to 92:05 on two CDs; the booklet has 32 pages in German, English and French.