A painting evokes memories of an earlier awareness of life. From this Philipp Maintz has drawn the material for his orchestral work, commissioned by the WDR Symphony Orchestra.

“Der Zerfall einer Illusion in farbige Scherben” [The disintegration of an illusion into coloured shards] is the title of a 2021 painting by the young Leipzig painter Gustav Sonntag, in which abrupt contrasts collide. Sonntag observes the present with an unsparing and socially critical eye, and aims to reinterpret the traditions of the Leipzig School with his painting in the figurative style. Philipp Maintz discovered the painter and his work by chance. The gritty, yet poetic title evoked memories for Maintz and inspired him to compose his new orchestral work “der zerfall einer illusion in farbige scherben”.

Maintz writes: “Gustav Sonntag’s painting and its title spontaneously opened a door to a past for me, at a time when I had just moved to Berlin and was drifting through the nights there.” A special awareness of life arose which Maintz describes thus: “We thought that from now onwards, the world would only be good and the music we had danced to would get faster and faster.” Back then, the particular contrasting recollection of the “singing blackbirds on the way home (often enough in the early morning)” made an impression on the composer. This “song” has “something very promising” for him, and to this day he gets goosebumps when he listens to a blackbird. Maintz has fashioned this wealth of different impressions into a multi-layered orchestral work which is about the realisation that “every artist is the child of their time – whether they like it or not. And that every work of art also incorporates the time of its creation – whether the artist wants it or not”.

Maintz compares the piece with a “kind of diary entry or a backwards view, the details of which increasingly drift apart at different speeds, making a chronological ‘narrative’ impossible, but nevertheless allowing everything to move in the direction of the same horizon over which the sun rises – and the blackbirds sing …”

A special feature of the composition lies in the use of an obbligato accordion, whose versatile and colourful sonority has long fascinated the composer. This has resulted in an interesting coincidence and contrast of sound worlds, and out of the “colourful shards” a new, mosaic-like sound world has been created.

Robert Krampe
(from [t]akte 1/2024 – translation: Elizabeth Robinson]