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After the Violinkonzert [Or the death of Alban Berg] (2024)
for 10 violins or 5 duos
I. November [Vienna is cold and damp]
II. Radios and Insects
III. Sepsis
IV. Weihnachten [Christmas Eve]
V. Death
VI. Vienna after the War
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In Portbou (2023)
for Pierrot Ensemble,
Electronics, Mezzo, and
Baritone.
Walter Benjamin was born on the 15th of July, 1892 in Berlin, then the capital of the German Empire. He dies on the 26th of September 1940 at the age of 48 by suicide after swallowing morphine tablets at a hotel in Portbou, Spain bordering France. His death represented one in over six million Jewish people who had perished during the Holocaust.
During the 48 years he was alive, his work as a literary critic and philosopher forever changed the course of European thinking. He worked within a strange syncretic intersection of ideas and disciplines still unmatched in its originality. He was a Marxist theoretician in the Frankfurt school, a Jewish mystic, a translator of French poetry, an Encyclopedist, a German literary scholar, a psychedelic writer, an experimental art radio broadcaster, and a socialite in various intelligentsia. His many friends included renowned yet disparate figures of the 20th century, from Georges Bataille, Hannah Arendt, Theodore Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Gershon Scholem, to Kurt Godel.
This piece follows the last 7 years of Walter Benjamin's life.
Movements
I. Prologue (0:00) Pre-Death II.
Berlin 1933 (1:25) A musical collage
III. Exodus (6:05) On memory and symbols
IV. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (10:57) "Music came to a full stop with Brahms. And even in Brahms one can begin to hear the sound of Machinery." - Ludwig Wittgenstein
V. Angelus Novus (16:56) "This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps pulling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet." - Walter Benjamin
VI. Postlude (27:03) Post-Death
VII. Post-Life [Manhattan 1967] (28:28) Resurrection of a ghost