Curriculum vitae. Monumentum pro Ingeborg Bachmann

Curriculum vitae. Monumetum pro Ingeborg Bachmann was written in 2005 as a commission from the Haydn-Trio Eisenstadt for the project “Bachmann set to music” in honor of the 80th birthday of the important Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973).

Curriculum vitae is a musical reflection on certain aspects of Ingeborg Bachmann’s life and thought as expressed in her poetry. The texts have not been set to music, but individual poems such as The firstborn country (Das erstgeborene Land) and Black Waltz (Schwarzer Walzer) have been used as a source of inspiration for the composition of this two movement work.

At the beginning of the Trio, the violin and the cello introduce a hocket-like passage which lasts over one minute and that, together with the following arpeggio in the piano, is used as a basis for the harmonic and melodic development of the whole piece and returns several times in altered form.

Another germ cell traces back to a musical quotation: Ingeborg Bachmann’s posthumous volume of poetry fragments, published under the title I know of no better world, in which unmistakable allusions to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde inspired an alienated reminiscence of this opera’s famous love duet in the middle section of the second movement ('Mild and soft').