Cerha: Eine blassblaue Vision, für großes Orchester

Alborada del grazioso and La Valse frame my piece in this concert; greater contrast, sharper discrepancy are scarcely conceivable.

Pale Blue Vision: actually, I do not like such titles and I have avoided them for many decades, because they often influence one’s expectations with a “programme.” But in this case, there was a very specific reason for choosing the title.

Music comes to me very often in the morning when I am in that state between sleep and wakefulness. On one of those mornings, the music was coupled with a visual experience: a gestalt with burred contours, as if swathed in mist, which initially pulsed lightly outward from within – a movement which later took on daunting proportions for a while before ebbing away again. Still in my dream, I couched it in terms of the colour pale blue, perhaps influenced by the fact that I had reread Werfel’s A Woman’s Pale Blue Handwriting a few weeks earlier. Bathed in gentle light, the gestalt initially stood before a background as black as night. As I increasingly neared awakening, the gestalt slowly dissolved in fine vapours, leaving an empty mandorla behind. I tried twice to capture the experience by painting it – but the music was there at once, spontaneously.

It was not until after I had completed the score that I discovered the neologism Knabenmorgen Blüthenträume [“A boy’s morning dreams of blossoms”] in an old edition of Goethe’s Prometheus. I was fascinated; the scent of that neologism, the atmosphere it diffused, were the very same as those of my dream and – I hope – my music. Since then, I have learned that the word has long since struck other people, too; in newer editions – including Schubert – only the Blütenträume remain.

Friedrich Cerha