B&B
"...aus Wasser Seele" (...from water soul) was composed in 2011 for the "Eight Cellists of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra." On 22 July 2012, the ensemble participated in an "open community dance project" – under the auspices of the Bregenz Festival (and jointly run by the Graz Theaters and the Jeunesse Austria) – that, (as a composition competition) under the title "Panta rhei – everything flows," had searched for works for two to eight cellists on the theme "water as meaning for the journey of life and motion," and indeed in the "thematic style" of Friedrich Smetana’s "The Moldau." Young composers (up to the age of 35) sent in submissions from which the jury (Detlev Glanert, Christoph Stradner, and festival director David Pountney) selected three compositions that were then "further worked on within the framework of a master class with composer Detlev Glanert," with the goal of premiering them – framed by a "dance version" of Smetana’s "Moldau" (with specially composed transitions by Glanert and the prizewinners) performed by amateur dancers – on the Bregenz "workshop stage." The three "equal winners" were (in alphabetical order) Bernd Richard Deutsch ("...aus Wasser Seele"), Martin Sadowski ("Entfernte Flusslandschaft"), and Steffen Wick ("Lympha").
As the motto for his composition, Deutsch chose a sentence from a fragmentary manuscript (later known as "perí phýseos” [“About Nature”]) by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (ca. 520–ca. 460 BCE), which has come down to us only in fragmentary quotations by Plato, Aristotle, and early Christian authors: "For souls it is death to become water, for water death to become earth, but from earth water is born, and from water soul" ("psych?sin thánatos hýdor genésthai”). The “becoming water” is symbolized right at the beginning by “dripping” harmonics, behind whose increasingly denser interweavings A-Major sounds can be distinguished, until gradually a “river” of sound, so to speak, results with various harmonic interpretations of the fundamental material. Things return again reprise-like to the opening events to then initiate yet another dramatic intensification with which the work concludes.
© Hartmut Krones (2011)