In deinen süßen Händen - Musik für verlorene Seelen 

Schöne Welt, wo bist Du?
 

This question has been asked throughout the ages and reappears in a poem that Schiller wrote in 1788. The same words also begin this new project, an exploration of existence, wandering and mourning.
 

My existence, melancholic and sensitive by nature, oscillates between light and

shade. Music has always been my refuge: a place of expression, of understanding of

emotions, and of solace. Not only did I want to reveal the fragility that pervades my

life through music and poetry, but I also desired to give voice to the wounds we all

carry in silence, sometimes from fear, sometimes from modesty.
The loss of a loved one, a break-up or a disillusionment can sometimes render us silent, plunging us into profound solitude in the midst of an emotional wandering that struggles to find rest. I found it essential to name these states of mind and to make them audible, hoping that their resonance might, in one way or another, ease the pain of others.
 

I wanted to construct a narrative framework from a selection of Lieder by Franz

Schubert, choosing songs whose themes centred on melancholy and death as inner

states of being that music makes perceptible through tempo, texture and harmony.

Agitation, renunciation and appeasement trace a path through these works; absence,

frustration, anger and peace are presented on this journey not as opposites but as

complementary facets of the states we go through at different stages of grief.

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Melancholy is never just a state of mind in Schubert’s Lieder: it is a way of existing

in the world. It slips into every musical breath, into vocal lines that are both simple

and infinitely fragile, as if the music were constantly wavering between consolation

and abandonment. Schubert gives a voice to wandering and lonely souls who have

often been wounded by love, time or the impossibility of a peaceful future.
The piano does not accompany: it thinks, it remembers, it whispers what words dare not say. Death is ever-present: it never appears as a dramatic utterance but as an intimate, almost familiar presence. It is rest, a promise of silence, and sometimes ultimate gentleness itself. For Schubert, to die does not always mean to disappear: it is a melting into the night, into nature, into another place where pain dissolves.
This proximity between life and death gives his Lieder a deeply moving intensity that lies suspended between light and darkness.

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The programme opens with Die Götter Griechenlands, which expresses a profound

melancholy at the disappearance of the idealised world of ancient Greece.
The musical discourse opens and closes with a series of octaves that resonate like a death knell and reinforce the haunting question: „Schöne Welt, wo bist Du?“
The harmonic choices reinforce the impression of a gaze turned towards the past marked by sadness and disillusionment.
 

Der Jüngling und der Tod presents a radical contrast between musical characters.

The tormented syncopated writing that depicts a young man’s longing to leave this

world is in strong contrast to Death’s response, which is stripped to its essentials

and implacably stable. This contrast highlights one of the essential paradoxes of

Schubert’s aesthetic: death as relief.
 

The circular piano figuration in Gretchen am Spinnrade creates a paradoxical immo-

bility: the incessant movement of the spinning wheel prevents any real progress.
This repetitive writing, supported by unstable modulations and expressive chromaticism, traps the voice in an obsessive present; it gives the impression that this passionate turmoil sustains the narrator as much as it destroys her.
 

Die junge Nonne illustrates another form of emotional turmoil. The initial storm in the

piano part reflects the upheavals outside as well as the young nun’s inner spiritual

crisis. The final luminous calm of the “Alleluia” is achieved only at the price of
a radical detachment from the world, of a renunciation of earthly life.
 

Another female figure appears in Vom Mitleiden Maria: the Virgin Mary, who is confronted with her son’s suffering in almost motionless contemplation. Schubert sets this deep compassion to music with a solemn and clear vocal line that resembles a Lutheran chorale; it conveys a painfully contained interiority that is almost silent.
 

Night and its mystery and contemplation — a major theme in German Romanticism —

appears in Nachtstück, which traces a man’s journey towards the end of his life through slow harmonic progressions. The nocturne is not soothing but filled with a dull anxiety; the following words echo through the darkness:
 

Du heil’ge Nacht!

Bald ist’s vollbracht.

Bald schlaf ich ihn

Den langen Schlummer,

Der mich erlöst

Von jedem Kummer.
 

Abendstern, however, offers a fragile clarity that evokes a distant light. The vocal

line, almost motionless and subdued, imbues the gentle sweetness of resignation

with melancholy.
 

if there is a deity in this world, for me it is embodied in Johann Sebastian Bach. What

do we expect from a god? That he saves us from our torments and brings peace to our souls. Bach illustrates the doubts and torments of the human soul in his music like

no other, bringing order to chaos and allowing diffuse and tortuously tender
emotions to strive towards the light. He struck a skilful balance between horizontality and verticality, between the connection of the bowels of the earth to the divine heavens.

It was essential for me that he should bring light and purity to this programme, acting

at times as an echo that reinforces Schubert’s emotion, at others as a luminous
breath to help regain one’s footing in times of melancholy.
 

Intimacy becomes a universal language in Johann Sebastian Bach’s keyboard music.

The Capriccio sopra la lontananza del suo fratello dilettissimo transforms separation

into suspended meditation, while the Aria from the Goldberg Variations reveals an area of rest and absolute balance. The continuous inner tension of the Prelude in C minor is rigorously ordered but is not allied to turbulent emotions; a conquering light gradually emerges that mirrors the treatment of the Young Nun or Gretchen’s inner turmoils.
 

Bach and Schubert share the same ambition: to make absence audible.
Whether it takes the form of obsession, prayer, night or farewell, it reveals an acute awareness of finiteness, one which music does not at all dispel but rather makes intensely present. Where Schubert reveals a wound, Bach builds a space to traverse it. A place of contemplation and meditation in which time seems suspended.
 

The pianist Aurélia Vişovan was the ideal companion for exploring these two

demanding bodies of work thanks to her profound listening skills and remarkable

technique. Her delicate approach is supported by the warm and subtle colours
of her instrument, Stephen Paulello’s Opus 102.
 

This album does not provide definitive answers but instead opens a door to
a sensory experience which, I hope, will offer a little light, sweetness, and acceptance in the face of these great questions. It invites us to listen to our inner selves, to be present in the moment, to echo our emotions. Between voice and silence, between Schubert and Bach, a space emerges in which music becomes an act of existence, perhaps even a form of consolation and tenderness.
 

Coline Dutilleul

 

​www.aureliavisovan.com

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​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​In deinen süßen Händen • Musik für verlorene Seelen
 

 "Il faut que le noir s’accentue pour que la première étoile apparaisse."

  Christian Bobin

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Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

1. Die Götter Griechenlands, D. 677  (poem: Friedrich von Schiller)

2.Abendstern, D. 806 (poem: Johann Mayrhofer)

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Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
3. Capriccio sopra la lontananza del suo fratello dilettissimo, BWV 992: III. Adagiosissimo – Ist ein allgemeines Lamento der Freunde

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Franz Schubert
4. Der Jüngling und der Tod, D. 545 (poem: Joseph Ritter von Spaun)

5. Leiden der Trennung, D. 509 (poem: Heinrich Joseph von Collin)
 

Johann Sebastian Bach

6. Aria von den Goldberg-Variationen, BWV 998 

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Franz Schubert

7.Vom Mitleiden Mariä, D. 632 (poem: Friedrich von Schlegel)

.8. Die junge Nonne Op. 43, No.1, D. 828 (poem: Jacob Nicolaus Craigher de Jachelutta)

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Johann Sebastian Bach

9.Praeludium und Fuga in C-moll, BWV 847 aus dem 1. Teil des Wohltemperierten Klaviers

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Franz Schubert

10. Gretchen am Spinnrade Op. 2, D. 118 (poem: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

11.Schwanengesang Op. 93, No.3, D. 744  (poem: Johann Chrysostomus Senn)

12.Nachtstück, D. 672 (poem: Johann Mayrhofer)
13.Auf den Tod einer Nachtigall (II), D. 399  (poem: Ludwig Christoph Heinrich Hölty)

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Johann Sebastian Bach

14. Capriccio sopra la lontananza del suo fratello dilettissimo, BWV 992: I. Arioso: Adagio – Ist eine Schmeichelung der Freunde, um denselben von seiner Reise abzuhalten.
 

Franz Schubert

15. Berthas Lied in der Nacht, D. 653 (poem: Franz Grillparzer)

16.Du bist die Ruh, D. 776 (poem: Friedrich Rückert)

17. Melodram – Abschied von der Erde – Fragment aus dem Gedichte „Der Falke“,

D. 829 (poem: Adolf von Pratobevera)