Symphonischer Essay

"When I began working on an ensemble piece in the summer of 2007, I experienced rehearsals of Beethoven's 8th Symphony under the direction of my then conducting professor, Bruno Weil. After one rehearsal, two fortissimo bars stuck with me: shortly before the end of the symphony—the music has finally returned to the tonic of F major and is now attempting to conclude—five rhythmic layers (whole notes, quarter notes, triplet quarter notes, particularly striking eighth notes in the timpani, and triplet eighth notes) are layered on top of each other in a repeating bar.
This became the starting material, the quarry for a four-movement ensemble work:
The bars are refracted as if through a kaleidoscope, dynamically varied, and repeatedly re-layered horizontally and vertically.
Then the F major, which had always been very present, becomes clouded, its motoric movement displaced in favor of vocal lines. This is followed by a scherzo movement in which the opening F major returns – but this time the aggressive, misanthropic mood of the first section becomes a positive, pastoral F major.
In the fourth movement, the quotation undergoes a further metamorphosis: as if in slow motion, it now plays out at a significantly slower tempo, and the rhythmic forms, heard concentrated at the original tempo as a climax, now form the framework for peaceful music.
The work premiered in four-movement form in October 2007.
When a request for a new work came from Peter Stangel and his Chamber Symphony in the spring of 2008, I decided to create a fundamentally new version.
The four-movement structure was removed, some elements were streamlined, the building blocks were completely rearranged in many places, and some parts were newly composed. Thus, after an oboe cadenza, into which the trio of the Scherzo flows, the vivace opening appears once again, unsuccessfully attempting to return to Beethoven's music.
While writing this text, I was reminded of the passage from Beethoven's Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802, which was lying on my desk during the composition and could be a motto for this chamber symphony: 'O you people who think of me as hostile, stubborn, or misanthropic, how wrong you do me...'" (Johannes X. Schachtner)