DIE LIEBESMASCHINE for string quartet

DIE LIEBESMASCHINE, litterally ‘the love machine’, is the transfiguration for string quartet of the two Tristan-Lieder by Richard Wagner ‘Im Treibhaus’ and ‘Träume’. The original musical text is kept in its integrity but transferred towards the high, in an ‘otherwordly’ dimension, unreal, imaginary, ‘ghostly’ (almost all the composition uses artificial harmonics); the voice is, however, absent, the singing is implied, only its ghost aura indeed remains. It is music that comes from an already unreachable and lost dimension, lost as are the leading actors of the events, both literal and real; it is expression of a feeling that is not more possible to stage, the expression of which lingers in a frozen state, displayed only by means of a ‘machine’ that can only simulate it. Inaudible fragments of the text are combined with the score pointing out poetic suggestions, debris that arise from a distant memory almost inaccessible:

Im Treibhaus

… Schwere Tropfen seh ich schweben …. 

… umschlinget wahnbefangen

  öder Leere nichtgen Graus …

(‘I can see heavy drops slip’ / ‘and insanely you grasp the empty horror of the desolate nullity’)

Träume

… Träume, die wie hehre Strahlen … 

… Allvergessen, Eingedenken! …..

… und dann sinken in die Gruft …

(‘Dreams that, as sublime rays’ / ‘Absolute oblivion, that everything remembers!’ / ‘and finally in the tomb they sink’)

The composition was written for the Concert Season of the Accademia di Musica di Pinerolo on the 200th Anniversary of the death of Wagner.