New Music By Karlheinz Essl

Tristan’s Lament seems to allude Tristan’s complaint in the third act, when he is sick to death awaiting his beloved and “best doctor”, Isolde. However, Essl has chosen a sequence from the prelude, and by a program written in MaxMSP he moves through the sound in slow motion, back and forth, quicker and slower, until the time flow stops. In every performance, the live improvised reconstruction creates new variations – endless configurations of an endless melody. In Wagner’s prelude, the “awful yearning” implies the longing for love in every person of the play, and it is musicalized in chromatic shifts and the famous Tristan chord, that has broken the traditional tension patterns of tonality. Sighs and suspensions claim for solutions, which Essl denies, again and again turning back, as if the loops of increasing tension could prolong the bittersweet pain of expecting love in missing it. A sudden “forte” dies away, there is no increasing progression towards a climax, no breakthrough into bliss – not even the bl