Marley's Ghost

«Marley was dead: to begin with.» Thus Charles Dickens begins one of his most famous narratives, the name of which literally means ‹a Christmas song›. Dead, or let‘s better call it well-worn, copybook and totally hackneyed by being cinematized a little bit too often, is basically everything today, which comes close to brushing against this advent faerie tale that has been pancaked so very often in order to fit into any TV show where Bill Murray might appear. Why, this being the case, starting here?

Christmas comes back every year, come hell or high water. As dead as old Marley may appear—that is to say «dead as a door-nail»—as vitally he is still haunting ubiquitously as a ghost. The world has been most ardous ever since and of all things it‘s Christmas when we expect even the grumpiest fellows to come in with apparent brouhaha of felicity. In the middle of the mess the big guns are hauled out: bell-roars, glistening candlelight-beflickered straw stars and an e‘en celestial haze of pathos and liquorice. All humbug!

In my music one can hear all the ingredients of the humbug merged in such a way that a dramaturgical course arises out of it. This pathway runs along selected passages from Dickens‘s novel. The narrator eventually turns into the ghost of his own figure.

«Marley‘s Ghost» was composed in 2017 for the baritone Georg Klimbacher and the pianist Andreas Fröschl, who premiered the piece in the same year at Vienna‘s Arnold Schoenberg Center. I wrote the version for baritone and ensemble in the spring of 2020. The orchestration means a recreation in many regards: A differentiation in layers of tonal colours led to new harmonic illuminations or to compositional proliferations. A major challenge was the translation of those shades into an orchestral language which had already been delineated by the use of inside-the-piano techniques. The realisation of the extended version of «Dickens‘s humbug» was essentially inspired by Morgana Petrik, whom this version is cordially dedicated.