Hyperion-Fragments
for piano [2009/2018] | duration: 19’00”
1. … ins Ungewisse… (5’00”)
2. … dort droben im Licht … (5’00”)
3. … geworfen … (9’00”)
As in the case of Johannes Brahms’s “Schicksalslied”, the poem at the center of Hölderlin’s novel serves as the point of reference for this composition, albeit in a more general sense. The fragments from this text are to be understood primarily as atmospheric triggers which mark an area of tension between two extreme poles. On the one hand, you have an “earthly” forlornness, in a search for certainties, from a position of gloom. And, on the other hand, in the second movement, there is the heavenly sphere of light, of a life in a bubble of infinite harmony, which is cognizant of and admits only one’s own state of mind. We feel tossed back and forth between this utopia of thoughts and our deficient reality, in a fragmentary world full of contradictions.
The music evolves from contrasts, especially in the third piece, the “synthesis” of the two preceding ones. Whether one projects the metaphor onto musical forms of expression – the second piece, for example, is structured in a personal variation of “hermetic” dodecaphony – or whether one associates general social conditions with it – a time of technical upheavals like ours always proves to be a period of pessimistic search for meaning – may remain open, as the word in the titles suggest.
Martin Lichtfuss – piano