In his new work “Litanei” Beat Furrer condenses verses by Ingeborg Bachmann creating an intense sonic space oscillating between wordlessness, the search for language and a cry.

The Venetian Renaissance poet and musician Gaspara Stampa (1523–1554) encounters Ingeborg Bachmann across four centuries, transcending linguistic and temporal boundaries. Out of texts from the writer’s literary estate dedicated to Stampa, Beat Furrer creates the basis for “Litanei”, his new work for soprano, bass clarinet and string quartet. The work will be premiered in June at the “Coming Together” Festival of the Louth Contemporary Music Society in Dundalk, Ireland, and creates a musical convergence of the two poets’ works. 
What the two authors have in common is the experience of existential shock. After her separation from Max Frisch, Bachmann found resonance in Stampa’s yearning verses, ranging from desolation to the longing for death. For Gaspara Stampa, who died young, the trigger was unrequited love for the Count Collaltino di Collalto, to whom she dedicated her posthumously published poetry collection “Rime” (1554), an artistic legacy of Renaissance love poetry.

“Litanei” picks up on this particular interpretation – in the year of Bachmann’s 100th anniversary. Beat Furrer says of the vocal text: “The two languages Italian/German result firstly from Bachmann’s implied identification with Stampa and underlies the fragility of the singing subject: as it were a dialogue of different characters, alternating between recitative-like closeness to the spoken sound of language and arioso embeddedness in the instrumental sound. On the threshold of wordlessness, the cry of despair, revolt and resignation.”

“Everything is lost, the poems first
then sleep, then the day as well,
then all else which was in the day (...)
until there is less than nothing and I am no longer
and there was absolutely nothing.”

This is how it is in the verses Bachmann left behind, in which the experience of a profound loss is poignantly expressed. “Much more than a poem, these are erratic blocks of a fragile language which are preserved in the composition and ordered anew”, says the composer. “The instrumental ensemble contrasts with the sound of the spoken language, speaking with “another voice”, or embedding the voice in a resonant harmonic space. This movement, from speaking to singing, is executed twice in different ways, as a movement from the recitative-like – the opposite of ensemble sound and the speaking voice – to a cry or to the reconciled sense of belonging found in the receding echo.”

Tessa Singer
(from [t]akte 1/2026)
(translation: Elizabeth Robinson)