18

Compositions

Nuun

1

Nuun for two pianos and ensemble (1995)

Abruptly, with an eruption of the brass section, the piece’s material in its totality resounds. Like in a palimpsest, several musical processes and motifs are superimposed on top of each other, creating a dense and turbulent texture. The two pianists, Florian Müller and Johannes Piirto, intermittently speed across several octaves of the note ‘b’, whilst the ensemble sweeps everything along in a motoric up-and-down movement. Employing a filtering process, Furrer extracts distinct sound layers from this texture, makes them overlap and pervade each other and, in this manner, creates Nuun’s dramaturgy.

Halfway through the piece, the pressure suddenly abates; the texture starts to become porous and disintegrates. Only a few outbursts, like flashbacks, evoke memories of the tutti’s initial intensity. Now it seems as if time has stood still. The piece’s title Nuun, in fact, refers to this shift of perception. In Meister Eckhart’s (1260–1328) theology of the late Middle Ages, ‘Nu’ designates the supratemporal moment in which all time is unified. The meaning of the modern German term ‘nun’ is derived from this concept.

2–4

Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (2020)

This piece consists of three untitled movements, whose very distinct characteristics, however, never disguise the fact that they are closely related. Sequences of key notes underlie all three. Although never directly audible, they nonetheless provide the foundation for ever new harmonic structures, as well as the basis for the close relational links between the movements. In the first movement, Furrer extricates a melody from a gliding harmonic motion, inscribed with the principle of intersection pertaining to a kaleidoscope. Imagine looking into such a device, perceiving the arranged images as diverse, already independently developing lines of musical material, which, through rotation, are made to intersect with one another, resulting in a great number of different combinations. Floating far above the orchestra, the violin’s melody glides through the chords from whom it is originally derived, until it has achieved an elegant autonomy and starts to sink into the lower registers, where it intersects with the ascending orchestra. Here, the kaleidoscope rotates at a slow pace; thus, all sections gradually flow into one another.

In the second movement, the rotation swiftly picks up speed and the music becomes more erratic and more tightly woven. Tiniest melody particles crop up, pick up speed and align themselves with the harmonic structure, where they are augmented by speaking glissandi, only to detach themselves again after a short while. In the course of this process, melodies arise and pass away again.

The third movement unites melodic particles from the two preceding movements. The emergent monodic melody is split up into polyphony; great interval leaps, partly speaking and partly singing passages, intersect eachother –as in a kaleidoscope. The Concerto for Violin and Orchestra is fully aware of its own genre. It is a virtuoso concerto, partly accom-pa-nied by a leading orchestra, and then again intimate, like chamber music, whilst soloist Gunde Jäch-Micko is continuously in search of a melody somewhere between song and noise. In the end, the possibility of other variants exists – besides the one that has been found.

5

Concerto for Clarinet and Ensemble (2020)

Like the beginning of a thread, solo-clarinettist Olivier Vivarès starts playing the Concerto for Clarinet: His line is simply there, speaking in a whisper, almost tonelessly. After a few bars, Furrer starts to divide this thread with a fine blade, splitting it according to various different sound qualities. From the ensemble, various instruments emerge, playing around the spliced ends, imitating or contrasting them – as if highlighting some of the clarinet-line’s various characteristics with floodlights equipped with foils and filters, each of a different colour. In order to do this, Furrer interlocks two separate structures: a linear line of development, and another, resembling a kaleidoscope, which consists of several intersecting lines. The speaking passages of the beginning are now interspersed with rapidly descending chromatic lines. The music becomes more polyphonic and harmonically more complex. At the end of the concerto, all these splinters are again united to form a single unisono thread. The ensemble, which has previously been divided, again merges in complete unison with the melodic line of the clarinet – all voices now join in, moving at times in an undulating, at times in a speaking fashion.

6

Concerto for Piano and Ensemble (2007)

In this Concerto for Piano and Ensemble, the ensemble modulates and expands the sound spectrum and the resonance chamber of the solo piano. To achieve this, Furrer uses spectral filters which allow him to transform inharmonic, metallic overtone spectra into harmonic, vitreous-sounding ones, and vice versa. Subtly he moves between the piano’s tempered tuning and the flexible intonation options at the ensemble’s disposal. Thus, oscillating effects are reinforced and prolonged, pulsating through the whole orchestra. Keys from the middle and lower range, which are mutely pressed, now become harmonic shadows of the staccato-chords played in the higher registers – the piano modulates its own sound spectrum. Soloist Joonas Ahonen is here juxtaposed with Florian Müller, another of the ensemble’s pianists, whose part also includes some soloist passages. Closely interacting with each other, the second piano follows the solo instrument like an inverted Doppelgänger, who seems to steal the other’s resonance. The concerto presents a display of all the piano’s acoustic possibilities, spread out in time, incrementally moving from the deep, thunderous bass strings all the way to a blazingly sharp descant. Like a swelling river, the music grows faster, assimilating sounds and resonances from its banks and influent streams – but, on several occasions, its rapid movement is arrested by various dams, coming to an almost complete halt. In these moments, the concerto listens to its own resonances

Retour an Dich

1

spur for piano and string quartet (1998)

Like in a train ride, objects situated closely to the window rapidly flash by, whilst others, at a greater distance, drift past in slow motion. The piano’s restless octave figures are contrasted by a rhythm in morse code in the low registers. Time and again, sharp pizzicato sounds erupt from the short-winded, scraping strings, as well as emphatic arco-strokes, flageolets and a bouncing saltando. What initially appears to be a fast-moving, irregular texture, turns out in truth to consist of several overlapping layers, which Furrer, like an archaeologist, lays bare, one after the other. Thus, the strings gradually come to the fore, the music becomes more transparent, moves upwards in a harmonic succession but remains reflexive all the time. Even at the point when all layers but the very last are ablated, their pulsing motor energy persists – as if the texture were resisting its complete exposure. In this way, the structure of spur gradually takes shape.

2–4

Retour an Dich for violin, violoncello and piano (1986)

Already in this early piece in three movements, the aesthetic and formal interests that will occupy Furrer for years to come become apparent: the sound-physiognomy of an outcry, as well as helically intersecting layers of material. Subtly, the shout announces itself in the first movement. Hard, pointed keystrokes from the piano accumulate an energy that the tremolo-strings absorb “somewhat fleetingly, restlessly, explosively”. The harmonic space that they circumscribe is set in helical motion, which grows increasingly tighter, literally depriving this pent-up energy of space – until, in the second movement, the anticipated outcry finally erupts: A fluid sound, close to break-down – compulsively interrupted, but also liberating. After that, all the parts freely diverge, as if they were linear, stretched-out variations of the fleeting, pointed sounds of the first movement. Their direction of escape appears random, but towards the end of the third movement, a new centre of gravity becomes vaguely perceptible, which, however, is located outside the piece. The helical dramaturgy of Retour an Dich is deeply personal and cosmological at the same time.

“I’m not talking about myself – not about you, of whom I’ve lost sight long ago – I’m talking of the hour of our mysterious encounter – I’m talking of the shards of glass, glittering like pearls at the bottom of the river, which, time after time, awaken our longing, which we try to retrieve, descending again and again, only to realise, back up on the surface, that they are mere shards of glass. – I’m talking of the path that leads to you, Fata Morgana, of the tapering spiral that creates a distance between you and me, endlessly turning, circling around an imaginary centre. The image of the spiral alludes to a state of weightlessness, created by the balance between what is similar and what is new – between static and dynamic, target-oriented models.” (Furrer)

5

apoklisis for two bass clarinets (2004)

Here, the term apoklisis (απόκλισης) stands for ‘divergence’, but also for its opposite: convergence. Both bass clarinettists – Bernhard Zachhuber and Olivier Vivarès – play almost the same music. Closely aligned, they start their linear descent into the depths. At the point where they intone the same multiphonics, the first differences arise. The two voices modulate each other. The deeper they go, the more they drift apart. Their earlier, slightly staggered unisono becomes a mutually interlocked embrace. Hocket-like, they complement and overlap each other and, partly in speaking tones, try to reduplicate again. In the lower registers, they actually come quite close to each other again. But a small distance, a small gap remains between them and prevents their blending together. Acoustic beats are the result.

6

...cold and calm and moving for flute, harp, violin, viola and violoncello (1992)

In cold and calm and moving, the music roams the nocturnal images, solidified by sleep, of Francesco Petrarch’s sonnet: Or che ’l ciel e la terra e ’l vento tace, (around 1348), which already inspired Claudio Monteverdi to compose a madrigal. In the sonnet’s four stanzas, an anonymous person lies in bed, sleepless; he “thinks” and “burns”. His thoughts revolve around his beloved – and an impending battle; in each stanza, sharp contrasts between immovable nature and human abysses appear. “Cold and calm and moving” are the hands of a young woman, for whom Giacomo Joyce, in James Joyce’s eponymous novella (1911–1914), is languishing. Like the thoughts of the nameless person, Furrer’s music revolves around always the same motifs. In helically increasing intervals, the calm passages played by the harp and flute are intersected by a recurring tempestuous string trio. As the helical diameter increases, new nuances of sound from the same original material emerge, and the two layers start to overlap in places. Thus, their tonal quality changes its colour. A regular pulse from the harp on the ‘g’ returns us to the calm breathing of the night, which dwindles with a final flute solo.

invocation VI

1–5

in mia vita da vuolp

based on Rhaeto-Romanic texts by Leta Semadeni

for soprano and baritone-saxophone (2019)

The poetic brevity, phonetic harshness, and the topos of death, which is ever-present in Leta Semadeni’s poetry collection in mia vita da vuolp (In My Life as Fox), have inspired Furrer to write music in which saxophone and voice augment each other, both semantically and soundwise. In analogy to the poems, in these five pieces he undergoes a change of perspective from human to animal.

In the first piece in mia vita da vuolp (In My Life as Fox), we slink through the coppice as a fox, until this ends with the final shot of the hunter. The text is fragmented, dissected by Furrer’s kaleidoscopic approach, and only in a very few instances is composed of intelligible words. The saxophone follows these words like a descending shadow that perpetually changes its sound, thus modulating the text’s meaning.

The second piece, Algordanza vi d’ün chavà coppà / Reminiscence of a Horse Battered to Death, is a painful, dramatic requiem for a slaughtered horse; the language is sad, the experiences traumatic. Saxophone and voice share the anguished cry. In the third piece, Illas nots / During the Nights, it’s not clear whether the text speaks of human perceptions or those of an animal. – “During the nights / on the fringes of the village / where I live / on the fringe of things / the blades / of winter / snatch at me”. Here, the sound of the saxophone is divided into two separate layers, alternating between sound and noise in a way that allows them to become a vividly immediate form of onomatopoesis and a speech-like figure at the same time. The singer’s voice remains independent and keeps closer to the text’s prosody than in any of the other pieces.

Semadeni’s haiku-esque texts often hint only vaguely at what they speak about. The fourth piece, Kasimir ha il mal d’amur / Kasimir is Lovelorn, ends with the head of the black goat Kasimir sinking into the grass. In analogy, voice and saxophone time and again descend to the very depths of their tonal range – lovesickness as a circular echo-loop.

The fifth and last piece doesn’t adopt an animal’s perspective, but changes into that of the cosmos Aint il spazi / In Space. From this vantage point, the children become faintly visible as they move about the earth. The voice outgrows the saxophone’s multiphonics, amalgamating them to form a continuous flux. This music of a perpetual transition dissolves our somatic experience of time at its fringes.

6

La bianca notte for soprano, baritone and ensemble, based on texts
by Dino Campana and letters by Sibilla Aleramo (2013)

La bianca notte portrays an episode from the life of the poet Dino Campana (1885–1932) from the years 1916–17, when he met the poet and feminist Sibilla Aleramo (1876–1960) and fell in love with her; an amour fou. Furrer dramatizes Campana’s texts and letters by Aleramo, telling the story of an encounter between these two on the eve of a futurist event in Florence, to which, in the end, Campana was denied access. Campana was inspired by futurism, however he disapproved of its underlying political ideology. He remained an outsider, incapable of communicating with his surroundings, which were dominated by norms and ignorant conformity.

His individuality as human being and artist, and consequently his whole existence and mental health, suffered as a result of this conflict. In his poetry, signs of mental problems, culminating in schizophrenia, shine through. Furrer transforms this inner and social conflict into music. He translates the futurists’ fascination with speed, technology and accelerated linear progress into a cutting technique which is inspired by cubism and by Campana’s idea of a compressed narrative. Full of longing, the music tugs at the lovers with microtonal intervals and frenetic circumambulations. The ensemble turns into an acoustic and semantic resonance chamber of their chanted speech – the music tells the story that the text can’t talk about.

7

invocation VI for soprano and bass flute (2023)

invocation VI is the sixth scene from the opera invocation, which Furrer composed, based on a text by Marguerite Duras’s novel Moderato cantabile (1958), with additional texts by Juan de la Cruz, Ovid and Cesare Pavese. In Duras’s novel, a woman is murdered by her lover in a café – allegedly by her own request. Her death scream forms the musical nucleus of invocation.

In invocation VI, the bass flute turns into the voice’s resonance – as if it were an extension of the singer’s larynx. Flute and voice merge in percussive consonants, in rushing tapestries of sound produced by their breath, and in song, in such a way as to create a polyphonic sound – as if Vera Fischer’s flute had in fact become one or several voices of the singer Friederike Kühl. In abrupt changes of expression, from tender invocation to insistent demand, this sound shifts from scream to language – whispering, screaming and singing – to the words of the Spanish mystic Juan de la Cruz (1542–1591), which invoke Jesus Christ in yearning, poignant tones resembling nocturnal love poetry:

“Why have you wounded this heart (…) Reveal your presence, even if to behold you is my death”. (from the Canciones entre el Alma y el Esposo)

8

Spazio immergente III for soprano, trombone and strings (2019)

Spazio immergente III (Immeasurable Space) lets us plummet into nothingness, in an abyss reminiscent of H. P. Lovecraft. In his didactic po-em De rerum natura, the classical poet and philosopher Lucretius (ca. 99–55 BC) describes an apocalypse beyond anything hitherto envisaged by the human imagination in visionary and timeless verses.

The trombone, virtuoso herald of the end, fathoms the vastness of Lucretius’s immeasurable space into which it and the soprano aimlessly plummet. We can intuit it through chant, language, breath, mutual imitations and tonal colours that modulate each other. The strings are like harmonic echoes of the two solo voices, reinforcing their accents and expanding the space by inserting additional axes in all dimensions. Spazio immergente III is Furrer’s third musical attempt with this fascinating text.

“…that not like flames should the walls of the cosmos quite suddenly escape into the immeasurable void, … and nothing, no residue remains – desolate space.” (Lucretius)

9–11

Xenos III for two percussionists and strings (2010/2013)

A strange shadow follows the words by the poet and librettist Händl Klaus that percussionist Lukas Schiske speaks into the hide of his timpani – “because I, ever since the sun, as the wind that always blows, had turned…” Furrer has recorded this text, which revolves around the desert, the heat, foreignness, memories and death, in his own voice; and later, with the aid of the software SPEAR, artfully re-orchestrated the rhythm and formants of the recording for an instrumental ensemble. In this way, the ensemble becomes the projection of Furrer’s voice, it speaks like him – a resynthesis of his speech. Double bass and percussion phrase along these words.

The remaining musicians colour this phantom-like speech, become its echo, and translate it into an organic, musical movement. This produces a chimerical sound, in which Furrer’s voice, intoned by the ensemble, becomes the resonance chamber for Schiske’s spoken words. Heterophonic differences open up; the cadences turn polyphonic. In the course of the three movements, the resonance chamber becomes more dominant and grows in size, until Schiske’s speaking voice finally disappears in the second movement. Only its sound remains as part of the ensemble, which now intones wordless phonemes. In this process, the music increasingly deviates from its initial analytical accuracy. The inflection, which in the beginning appeared closely linked to the oral expression, now starts to develop independently, following a musical logic, starting to modulate the text, to resume its sound, and finally turning into a shrilly distorted shadow of the previously spoken words. The sound of the language itself becomes the narrator of intimate fears, mental states and emotions. ‘Xénos’ (ξένος) is ancient Greek and means: foreigner, or guest.

Gaspra

1

linea dell’orizzonte for ensemble (2012)

Two intersecting sources of light produce distorted, redoubled shadows. For Furrer, the emergence of such heterophonic shadows becomes the formal template for linea dell’orizzonte. Two basically different sound sources – an amplified electric guitar via speakers, and the unamplified ensemble – determine the form. They illuminate the musical material, each with a different light. By means of a volume pedal, which obscures the transient, and specific instrumentation, the sound of the electric guitar at times merges with the ensemble; at others, its electrified characteristic is clearly emphasised. Binaural beats between flageolets are projected into the ensemble and adopted by it. Figures initially consisting of seven bars are repeated, each with a different, shorter sequel, until the sequel is firmly established and, in its turn, followed by new and still shorter sequels. Whilst the links of this concatenation become more and more compartmentalised and are finally granulated to form melodic motifs, the music becomes increasingly focussed and dialogic. Akin to the process of crystallisation, the fundamental components of linea dell’orizzonte appear in these sources of light. The shadow image is in constant flux.

2

intorno al bianco for clarinet and string quartet (2016)

The piece is dominated by a persistent, yearning pull, distending its proper time. The ensemble moves incrementally, in tiny intervals, through spectral combinations towards higher registers. Playing around indi-vidual notes, regular and irregular pulsations emerge from the beats created by tight glissandi. The string quartet expands the clarinet’s spectrum and vice versa. Little by little, the sound becomes more complex and more noise-like; and the clarinet breaks free of the string quartet. Having reached the highest registers, its sound morphs into a shriek.

This is followed by an accelerando; the planar, homogenous sound of the beginning is left behind like an early memory. The clarinet now takes the lead “presto delirando” through assorted fragments: Multiphonics, speaking figures, scratching excess pressure. The string quartet, too, becomes more pointed, falls behind the clarinet and attempts to enter into dialogue with it. The clarinet dominates this dialogue – the string quartet follows its lead. A staggered unisono starts to form. In order to give the ensemble an idea of this kind of movement, Furrer, in rehearsal, employs the image of a leap in slow motion.

intorno al bianco is the title of a villanelle by Pietro Antonio Bianchi (ca. 1540–1611), an Italian Renaissance composer who lived in Graz in the 16th century. Furrer borrows the title; intorno al bianco – “All Round the White”, an image that symbolises a movement in various shades of light.

3

Gaspra for ensemble (1998)

‘Gaspra’, named after the holiday resort in the Crimea, is an asteroid whose orbit lies between Mars and Jupiter. 200 million years ago, it was ripped out of a larger celestial body. Ever since this time, this piece of rock, 19 × 12 km in size, roams space caught between gravitational fields.

In Gaspra, Furrer divides the ensemble’s instruments into small groups: a muffled, abruptly stopped piano, a noisily whirring string trio, a duet made up of cello and clarinet, and another one combining percussion and piano. During the tutti passages, the flute joins in as well. It is one of the earliest pieces in which Furrer, with each repetition, transforms a rhythmic pattern, successively giving it a different shape. In analogy to this process, a continuous, targeted variation of a linked sound texture is taking place. Like the asteroid’s orbit, this linear development repeatedly happens to get pulled into other gravitational fields. There, seemingly chaotic forces tug at the fabric of the music, condense the ensemble sound and let it disintegrate again, until it is finally entrapped once more by its orbit.

4

Studie 2: à un moment de terre perdue for ensemble (1990)

Studie 2: à un moment de terre perdue for 16 musicians doesn’t refer to any external narrative. The title, too, merely hints at Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927). The intricate combination of four linear developments – an accelerando, a rallentando and two regularly beating patterns – prepare the scene for moments of tension, unfolding, and silence which create a fleeting, contradictory dramaturgy entirely immanent in the music. Similar to Gaspra, Furrer splits the group of musicians up, forming instrumental islands: piano and brass, strings, percussion and woodwinds. Again and again, crescendi of the strings and brass set in, triggering fragile, small-scale and intersecting concatenations of impulses. They are regularly interrupted by short periods of tense silence.

Here, the music gathers fresh energy: inaudibly it trembles in si-lence for the duration of one bar. The bass flute, a voice which is initially independent and not tied to the overall metre, forges links between these breaks. Little by little, the music’s oscillations emerge from the silence. Obscured trills and tremolos turn into clicking and chafing pulse generators that speak to us in morse code, thus revealing the existing alliance between events scattered throughout the entire piece. The piece ends in an unstable, thunderous shimmer.

Begehren 1

Begehren 2

Begehren Music Theatre for Soloists, Choir and Ensemble (2001/2003)

The consonantic sibilant of the word ‘Schatten’/’shadow’, with all its semantic implications, provides the impulse for the musical and dramaturgical development of Begehren. In a repetitive, continually shifting matrix, sound and meaning of the word are fanned out and permanently transformed. Its pulsing, breathing movement of dense and withdrawn textures, of the sounds of noise and of singing voices, pervades the entire piece. Singing, speaking, and instrumental sound continue, interrupt and dissolve each other. The libretto, compiled by Furrer, in cooperation with Christine Huber and Wolfgang Hofer, consists of several layers from texts by Cesare Pavese’s The Inconsolable (from Dialogues with Leucò, 1947), Günter Eich’s radio drama Don’t Go to El Kuhwehd! (1950), Ovid’s Metamorphoses (books X and XI; 1–8 AD), Hermann Broch’s Death of Virgil (1945) and Virgil’s Georgics (book IV, 37–29 BC). These text fragments which, in various constellations, reveal new aspects and associations, lead us into the myth of Orpheus without simply retelling it. Furrer moves freely in and around it.

Two voices: ‘She’ – sung by Sarah Aristidou; and ‘He’ – spoken by Christoph Brunner, are about to go their separate ways, they gradually drift apart. Their words describe encounters of desire and the memories of a failed love. In search of the other, both attempt to communicate; they strive to reunite, but nonetheless they drift further and further apart. Again and again, both are thrown back upon themselves and their own sound. ‘He’ looks back, but he cannot see ‘Her’, only his memories of her.

Even language separates the two: ‘She’ sings with Virgil in Latin, whereas ‚He’ expresses himself with Pavese and Broch in German. The choir, which creates the space and the mythological world of the music theatre with words by Virgil and Ovid, both in German and Latin, attempts to intercede, but it also represents the failed communication between the two and casts long shadows over them. In these shadows, the reasons for their separation lie also hidden.

In the course of the piece, ‘She’, who initially sings, is transformed into a speaking character. ‘She’ abandons her original role as Eurydice and becomes a real person outside the mythological world. In a reverse movement, ‘He’ morphs from a speaking to a singing character, as if remembering more and more clearly that he, once upon a time, had been Orpheus and is now transformed back again. His search for song is a search for ‘Her’.

In the seventh scene, the two processes intersect and both characters meet musically in the sound of their breathing and in the German language. In this moment, ‘She’ finds a way to talk: “Can you hear? / I can speak to you / as if you were here”. ‘He’, however, loses his language. In the end, ‘She’ stands at the centre of the music theatre, isolated, but also freed from old ties, whereas of ‘Him’, only various nuances of breathing sounds remain.

Synopsis

Scene I (He, She, Choir)From the sound of the first word, ‘shadows’, a musical texture of ascending lines develops – Ovid describes Orpheus and Eurydices’ ascent into the light. Orpheus’ look back marks the turning point – this moment becomes almost frozen in several repetitions.HE: There in that glimmer: the brilliance was the song and the morning.

Scene II (He, Choir) Ovid describes Orpheus’ power to bring the workings of the underworld to a standstill (Choir). HE: I seek to regain what has past. (Pavese)

Scene III (He, She) Two levels of expression stand alongside one another in this scene: while HE tries to remember – I seek, as I lament, nothing other than myself (Pavese) – SHE answers with Virgil’s Orpheus text in melodic motives. Worlds lie between both figures; this is also illustrated in the foreign language of Latin, in which SHE expresses herself.

Scene IV (Choir) A prolonged choral commentary adds to Virgil’s narrative: So she cried, vanishing relates directly to the song of the previous scene and, because of its similar density, is reminiscent of the world of scene, whereby the music further interprets the drama independently and the calls of Orpheus from the choir seem to be directed at the absent protagonists.

Scene V (He) Broch’s words, which revolve around stasis and forgetting, are interpolated by ‘Him’ with personal questions and images. Scored breath and a ‘silent scream’ are the first indication of an incipient expressive capability beyond verbal limitations.

Scene VI (He, She, Choir) Here, his speech (Broch) and her singing (Virgil) are – as in Scene III – also two isolated levels: HE is ‘near’, SHE and the chorus, intoning in ancient tonalities (Ovid), are ‘far away’, just as the further commentary from the ‘speaking’ instrumental parts is.

Scene VII (He, She) SHE now speaks German and formulates a utopian horizon in Eich’s words: “Do you hear, I could talk to you as if you were here”. Through breathing figures, which gradually draw relationships between one another, for a brief time something like a dialogue between the two figures comes into being – the possibility of an encounter is appearing.

Scene VIII (Choir) Fragments of Ovid about Orpheus’ death are developed in a variety of ways. Orpheus’ power is broken in the moment in which the din drowns out his song.

Scene IX (He, She) The levels of singing and speaking are now close to interchanging: SHE speaks (“whispered”), while HE – who is really “absent” – follows the soprano’s melody, and as a reaction hums its little figures, as if he might begin to sing at any moment.

Scene X (She, Choir) SHE is now alone and turns to him as an absent counterpart. Thus, the first words of the scene Do you hear? stretch like an arc across the whole work, but then lead into her inner self. Speaking, slow-motion scanning of the single words, individual sung notes and disrupted motifs spread out like different levels of consciousness and are shaded by the choir with nuance – at the end stands an opening into uncertainty.