In der Matratzengruft (2007)
(for tenor solo and ensemble)

The idea for this work was born immediately after reading the epilogue to the “Romancero”, which Heinrich Heine wrote at the end of September 1851. Until his death five years later, Heine remained in a garret on his deathbed, as if tied up. And yet he continued to write poetry, forging numerous verses in this last period of his life that are perhaps among his greatest.

Two thematic strands gradually crystallized in my piece. One was formed by the increasing fragility of the doomed Heine, who will end his life in the awareness of his physical state of definitive motionlessness - like a slowly deflating balloon. The poet's unflagging ardor to continue writing poetry forms the second level, a courtship for the precise expression and unambiguous meaning of rhyming words. Both strands drive the chronically dying man on without revocation.

From the collection of late works, I have attempted to compile Heine's associative compositional technique, his - in the words of the Germanist Ralf Schnell “lyrical dissonances, quotation montages, refractions and image leaps” - in the continuity of my new template. These elements of a heterogeneous formal language can also be found in the music.

The ensemble, in which the instruments are only soloists, binds the contrasting moods into a unity through hard cuts and ever-changing combinations of timbres. This is the musical parable of Heine's existence in spurts, where fragments of fragments sound seamlessly one after the other and often simultaneously, and where the knot between the true cause of suffering and the eternal question of “Why?” cannot be untangled. And why?

“And now farewell, dear reader, and if I owe you
something, send me your bill.” (H. H.)

M.K.
(Translation by Edition Peters)