Symphony No. 1 'Chimera'

There are works you write, and there are works that write their way into you. Chimera wears the mask of a symphony, but I know better: It entered wearing the skin of something lost. It is a return—backwards, yes—but also inward, a mirror swallowing its own reflection.

As a child, I would press my forehead against the glass and ask the reflection: Who are you? Why this face, these eyes? The dissonance between the outer copy and the inner original was excruciating.

The name Chimera contains multiple meanings, and I embrace them all: the mythological beast made of disparate parts, the impossible dream one cannot realize, the biological fusion of incompatible origins. These definitions are not contradictions. They are facets and refractions—light bending through memory’s prism.

I wrote Chimera by reimagining the material of my ballet The Little Mermaid, based on one of the most tragic stories by Hans Christian Andersen—a dark self-portrait of sacrifice and transformation masked by the illusory form of a fairytale.

But this symphony is not a suite or a summary. In my mind, it has little, if any, connection to the ballet. The transformation of the material is an alchemical act.

A theatre work moves through a story. Chimera moves through states of being, through liminality, through shadows. The mermaid, no longer content with silence, sheds her illusory self like a skin and becomes Icarus. The girl with a fish’s tail becomes the boy with wings. And both are swallowed by the sky. None of this is real and all of this is real, because music is the most abstract art form. Music carries no meaning beyond vibrations of sound in time—yet it holds within it every personal interpretation, memory, story, emotion, and image the listener may discover. Its vastness is the reflection of the listener.

The seven movements carry Latin titles. Each one is a door into a world I needed to name in order to enter:

• Aegri somnia — the dreams of the sick
• Post tenebras lux — light, yes, but only after darkness
• Gargoyles — guardians who weep stone tears
• Et in Arcadia ego — even in paradise, death speaks
• Siste, viator — halt, traveler: you are already within the underworld
• Humum mandere — to bite the dust, the futility of running into constant dead-ends while searching for the way out of the labyrinth
• Requiem for Icarus — not a fall, but an ascent burned into memory

The form of this symphony is not classical: there is no sonata map here, no expected resolution. It is not a static architecture, but migration—an echo, a slow-burning ritual. Motifs appear like fragments of dreams, like footsteps echoing on broken glass. Chimera is not a journey from point A to point B. It circles, ascends, descends, vanishes, returns. The structure is that of memory—not linear, but tidal. It is the kind of music that knows what it means to drown.

The boundary between existence and nonexistence is fragile. This is music that lives on the edge of forms, just as I live between languages, countries, and selves.

When I was a child in Chelyabinsk, I grew up in a city that did not exist. Outside, the walls bore the portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin. Inside, I read ancient Greek myths and imagined gods devouring their children. Outside was control. Inside was myth. Both were illusions. Both were reality. Bringing these disparate parts together was the way to survive—and to continuously transform.

Every day, a new Icarus kills himself. Every day, the wax melts.

I think of another chimera—Pan. Goat-legged, melancholy, embarrassed by his own form. And still he plays. That is the artist’s fate. To play—despite the monstrosity. To sing through grieving. To sing even if nobody is listening.

Chimera is an abstract work. It is also intensely autobiographical. Not in chronology—the soul has no timeline. I do not believe in the past tense, only in reflections.

I wrote my first song at age four. The song was about death. No one taught me then to fear that word. I spent early childhood playing among the gravestones.

The mermaid, Pan, Icarus, the chimera—they are more than symbols for me. They are beings that do not fit into frames. The mermaid cuts her tail and leaves her glorious kingdom of the sea to love someone who cannot love her back. Icarus attaches wings and flies in hope to find freedom. Chimeras are made of seemingly contradictory parts that never belonged together—yet breathe life all the same. And each of them, in some way, is my mirror.

Music is my native language. But it is not a language of explanations. It is a language of transformations. Tonality and dissonance are not opposites—they are coordinates. You know you are lost only because you once knew where home was.

Why do I give my works names, when music does not need words? Because titles, too, are offerings, invitations. Like a key quietly left on a table. You may choose not to use it, but it is there. Waiting.

I do not ask the listener to understand Chimera. Understanding is the wrong verb. I ask you to feel it, to meet it, to find it within yourself. To fly and fall with it. And maybe, if you are willing, to be transformed by the encounter.
—Lera Auerbach

‘Auerbach, who freely acknowledges the power of tradition, indeed cannot imagine writing music without the past, is more committed to the idiom of an Igor Stravinsky or a Gustav Mahler in the Symphony No. 1 ‘Chimera’: Powerful parallel runs of the instruments provide the necessary ‘expressive pressure’. Catchy, sometimes harshly pounding rhythms - both can be found right at the beginning, but especially in Gorgoyle's 3rd movement, which is entitled Allegro molto, ossessivo - are reminiscent of the beginning of Mahler's Sixth Symphony or Stravinsky's key work ‘Sacre du printemps’. Auerbach came up with a special finesse with the integration of the theremin. The electro-acoustic instrument, which is played with both hands - one hand controls the pitch, the other the volume - was developed around 1920 by the Petersburg-born Léon Theremin. The buzzing, singing sound of the theremin can be heard in two places: a cantilena and the glissandi typical of the instrument are integrated into the third movement of Gorgoyle, and the theremin can also be heard quite clearly at the end. Auerbach utilises the extreme range of nine octaves here.’ (Torsten Möller, programme booklet Düsseldorfer Symphoniker, 2006)