It is increasingly common to encounter women who think about women. This fascination and desire to delve into the intimate sensibility of one’s own gender draws us as bees are drawn to flowers. Perhaps this is due to the fragrance of intellectual nuance that emanates from such works—great works—whether in literature, music, the fine arts, or dance. Wherever a woman has passed, the scent of detail, of particularity, of intimacy remains unmistakable.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the female voice has been silenced throughout history. They already knew the power of this gender and feared its reach.
“Women cannot write, women cannot paint… Why did it matter to him, when it was obvious he did not say it because he believed it true, but because in some way it helped him?”¹
Perhaps it is only that the original sin has not yet been forgiven. If women had not yielded to temptation, would the world today be nothing but happiness and joy?² Yet the blame falls again and again upon Eve, and upon her inability to turn away from knowledge, as she had been instructed. Her love for Adam and her ecstasy in the paradise of Eden did not prevent her from seeking beyond the pleasures within her sight, even knowing the implications of her irreverence.
Eve’s Lament, or O Flowers That Never Will Grow is the theme selected by Lera Auerbach in this orchestral work from 2019.³
The Lament… was requested as a symbolic “letter of introduction,” also of another rebellious, creative, and visionary woman who does not fear standing before a mass of men and demanding that they “speak” louder or softer—or, conversely, that they remain silent until further notice. This courageous woman, following the tradition of Dudarova,⁴ does not fear confronting orchestral temperaments, but also asserts her role within society—and that of others like her—through art and the metaphor of her language.⁵
Suggestive human relationships emerge: women conducting men, an increasingly common phenomenon in our time and in artistic practice. This occurs largely thanks to those women who hear distant siren voices calling them toward expression and toward intellectual and personal inclusion.
“Woman is the being who casts the greatest shadow or the greatest light upon our dreams; she lives a life other than her own; she lives spiritually in the imaginations she both torments and fertilizes.”⁶
Auerbach is a woman: Russian-born, poet, composer, sculptor. Creation and thirst for knowledge have carried her to the personal limits of her gender and of patriarchal relations within the artistic world.
The role of the “angel in the house”⁷ is not for those who lose sleep over the secrets of creation, or over the numerological and mystical relations hidden in the simplest details. They are another species of flower—those that do not grow under the care of gardens, but rise upon mountain summits beneath stellar maps, dancing furious dances in winds of passion and inner anguish.
In Eve’s Lament, or O Flowers That Never Will Grow, Auerbach establishes a dialogue with John Milton’s Paradise Lost.⁸ Eve appears there as an irredeemable figure who has led to the loss of original paradise, while notions of evil and suffering are explored beneath the gaze of a “benevolent” God. Heaven and hell are examined not as physical spaces but as states of mind, marked by anguish, despair, ecstasy, and happiness.
It is no coincidence that the artist chose the subtitle O Flowers That Never Will Grow, for flowers have held profound importance throughout vast civilizations due to their fragility and subtlety, carrying within them the highest gradations of beauty. Aesthetics has lingered upon their conceptual forms: the capricious lines of their stems, the play of their colors, the morphology and multiplicity of their leaves, the delicate fragrance of their scent.
All these are fundamental elements of human dreams, which have shaped paradise into a sublimated notion of perfection across cultures. Flowers have become symbols for communicating emotions, states of mind, sensations, and also as allegories of the feminine and poetic means of spiritualizing matter.
From these essences arise the orchestrated melodies that shape this work of primordial inquietude.
In the first two minutes, we hear an apocalyptic introduction that reveals the moment of sin and its immediate consequences. Eve has clearly been manipulated by venomous Satan and has torn a fragment from the Tree of Knowledge. A bell⁹ metaphorizes time in its metallic binary accents. From above, it announces that the sin has been committed and sounds its spiritual warning. With it disappear safety, protection, joy, and certainty.
The sentence is pronounced. Paradise has ended.
“Forbidden knowledge! This is suspicious and irrational. Why should their Lord envy them knowledge? Is it a crime to know? Is it death? Does happiness exist only by ignorance? Is their happiness founded upon obedience?”¹⁰
After this moment, an atmosphere of liquid weightlessness permeates the work. Security dissolves into pain, suffering, and uncertainty. This is expressed through the sonic thread sung by the Ondes Martenot,¹¹ floating as though it were all that remained.
The composer entrusts this ethereal instrument with the “voice,” a breath of sound that persists while everything else collapses. Time itself seems to fracture against the stridencies of strings and brass.
This produces an ascetic sensation, transporting us into a vacuum chamber, into a white-on-white scene.¹² In dialogue with Malevich, the piece avoids representational qualities, seeking synesthetic absence of color, depth, and form—evoking suspension and weightlessness.
Like abstract painting, orchestration here produces an overexposure of light, flooding the orchestral canvas with symbolic whiteness that suggests infinity and transcendence.
Music, like great abstract art, achieves its highest form when it becomes less specific and more open to symbolism and allegory in the listener’s imagination.
More lyrical moments emerge, marked Nostalgico. Harmonics in the violins and delicate harp arpeggios create fragile figures like origami lotus flowers.
These harmonic textures create a vague, fragile, mist-shrouded environment. Harmonics, pizzicati with vibrato, slow glissandi—all poetic inventions of the composer’s sonic language.
Gradually emerges a silhouette: Henry Purcell’s melody What Can We Poor Females Do.¹⁵
Like memory or dream, its phrases murmur again and again.
Through this reference, Auerbach establishes commentary on the condition of women. The melody is distorted, transformed, and dissolved into spectral abstraction. The composer specifies exaggerated contrasts of tone color and expressive glissandi.
She instructs that the Ondes Martenot be played entirely with the ring to achieve a mystical sound.
She writes that the waterphone¹⁶ should create “the strangest and most otherworldly sounds.”
Through these instructions, she invites performers to participate in creation.
Does this work convey the uncertainty of woman’s place in society? Will women attain equal artistic recognition? Will their intellectual capacities be valued equally?
Today, horizons are broader, but the path remains incomplete.
This theme also appears in Olga Neuwirth’s opera Orlando, based on Virginia Woolf.¹⁷ ¹⁸
It was the first opera by a woman performed in the 150-year history of the Vienna State Opera.
“A late first step that shows how much remains to be done.”¹⁹
Virginia Woolf herself dedicated her literature to exploring female interior life. Her works stand at the forefront of feminist literature.
Thus emerges the allegory: O flowers that never will grow.
Flowers that never reached their full realization.
From the final chords of this score emerges a desolate melancholy.
We will never know whether Eve lamented taking the forbidden fruit—or awakening, like in The Matrix,²¹ to reality.
Only through knowledge can one perceive beauty.
Each person decides how to use their time.
Some lament.
Others think about women.
¹ Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), To the Lighthouse. British modernist writer and feminist pioneer.
² Reference to John Milton’s Paradise Lost and its theological inquiry into evil and suffering.
³ Eve’s Lament “O Flowers, That Never Will Grow.” Orchestral work by Lera Auerbach, premiered October 24, 2019, by the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna, conducted by Marin Alsop.
⁴ Veronika Dudarova (1915–2009), the first woman to conduct a major symphony orchestra.
⁵ Marin Alsop (b. 1956), conductor and Artistic Director of the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra.
⁶ Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867).
⁷ Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925).
⁸ John Milton (1608–1674), Paradise Lost (1667).
⁹ Tubular bells in the orchestra symbolize time.
¹⁰ Milton, in the voice of Satan.
¹¹ Ondes Martenot, invented in 1928 by Maurice Martenot.
¹² Kazimir Malevich, White on White (1918).
¹³ Harmonics assigned symbolically to second violins.
¹⁴ Henry Purcell (1659–1695), English Baroque composer.
¹⁵ What Can We Poor Females Do, by Henry Purcell.
¹⁶ Waterphone, invented by Richard Waters.
¹⁷ Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (1928).
¹⁸ Olga Neuwirth (b. 1968), Austrian composer.
¹⁹ Opera Actual, Spanish opera journal.
²⁰ Reference to Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia.
²¹ The Matrix, film directed by the Wachowski sisters (1999).
