Mieg evening: Aargau charm

Last year, flautist Jean-Luc Reichel would actually have liked to perform Peter Mieg's flute concerto, which he thinks highly of. Like so many others, this project fell victim to the pandemic. The fact that Reichel, together with his musical partner Joyce-Carolyn Bahner on the piano, was now able to present some of Mieg's works on a small scale was thanks to the first tentative easing of the national pandemic regime. Interwoven between the pieces Les plaisirs de Rued and Les Délices de la flûte for flute solo as well as a movement from the Piano Sonata IV and the Sonata for Flute and Piano were readings by literary scholar and translator Markus Hediger. He even runs a channel on YouTube with works by Peter Mieg, including Les Délices de la flûte can be listened to in Reichel's version.

Hediger's character descriptions and anecdotes about Mieg, whom he knew personally, painted a pleasurable picture of Swiss German culture in the mid-20th century. Mieg's penchant for perfectionism and his exhausting search for perfect, sometimes reclusive solutions down to the last detail corresponded to the spirit of the times, which helped Swiss arts and crafts achieve world fame in disciplines such as photography and typography. Mieg's coquetry with the contrast between the provincial and the cosmopolitan was also in keeping with this, when he labeled his (flute) works with titles such as Les charmes de Lostorf, Les Jouissances de Mauensee or Les humeurs des Salis provided. As a native of Lenzburg, he himself embodied the province of the province, so to speak: a region that the complacent economic center of Zurich still likes to look down on in a patronizing way and has to live with the fact that the overpowering cultural giant Germany, with its metropolises of Munich, Berlin and so on, looks down on the city on the Limmat with roughly the same condescension.

However, being on the fringes also shaped Mieg's work on an aesthetic level. He acquired his compositional craft outside of institutional music education, which allowed him to keep his distance from the avant-garde despite occasionally flirting with contemporary techniques such as dodecaphony. Identity offered him, as Tom Hellat and Anna Kardos point out in their Mieg monograph In search of your own sound (Hier und Jetzt, Verlag für Kultur & Geschichte, Zurich 2016), the character of Cinderella: Mieg met her in a performance of the ballet of the same name by the French-speaking Swiss composer Frank Martin. He perfected his compositional skills with him as a teacher or rather advisor ("coach" we would probably say today). Later, Gottfried von Einem and Alexander Tscherepnin also became friends.

Since Dieter Ammann and Sol Gabetta, but actually since the founding of the Künstlerhaus Boswil, Aargau has been playing in the top league musically, even if Zurich is rather hesitant to acknowledge this. Some of Mieg's works are certainly on a par with this. Hermann Burger, a world-class writer who - incidentally - was the lodger of Peter Mieg's cousin Jean Rudolf von Salis at Brunegg Castle, has also created a literary monument to him. Burger is forgotten today, Hediger said in Kehrsatz, but in his novel Burner He was immortalized with the artificial name Edmond de Mog, which brought him close to the Zurich conductor Edmond de Stoutz, with whom Mieg was also friends.

The Peter Mieg Foundation, which the composer himself set up, ensures that Mieg is not forgotten. Mieg was definitively ennobled by the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. It took over his musical estate in 2018. In turn, the Mieg Foundation has responded to the pandemic situation by calling on musicians to rehearse a chamber music work by Mieg and publish it online in order to "support them with a fee during the coronavirus pandemic". An original idea that may have led to Mieg's work receiving more attention than would have been the case in normal times.

As an encore after the concert in Kehrsatz, Joyce-Carolyn Bahner and Jean-Luc Reichel played the first movement of Poulenc's flute sonata. In doing so, they built a bridge to French culture, which strongly influenced Mieg's work, like that of many of his Swiss-German contemporaries. The fact that this phase of Swiss culture now seems somewhat alien to us undoubtedly has something to do with the fact that the enthusiasm for everything French at that time has practically been lost today. Our eyes and emotions are now focused on English and the East.

Red. SMZ. Another opportunity to explore the music of Mieg and some of his Swiss contemporaries is offered by the Othmar Schoeck Festival in Brunnen from September 10 to 12, 2021 under the motto "Passé composé - Neoclassicism in Switzerland".

www.schoeckfestival.ch