Pecking Chickens and Sunken Cathedrals - Summer Music for a Drunken Journey

The novel “Die trunkene Fahrt” (The Drunken Journey), which Der Spiegel called “a virtuosic, furious chamber play” and Die Zeit called “an artful, musically-composed, whimsical journey”, is as yet only available in German. But perhaps the novel is more fluidly translated into music than into other languages. This playlist follows the course of the plot and is at the same time a programme, taking each listener on their own drunken journey – through the mountains, through life, through the universe.

Piano music is the main focus, but only after the pompous opening with the seedy music critic’s hated Alpine Symphony, in which the sun rises out of nowhere, painfully blinding for the men lost in the previous day’s hangover. Afterwards, Bach and Liszt, the personal idols of the irascible pianist, weave the common thread. In between, Rameau’s pecking chicken and Goethe’s/Schubert’s post-coachman Kronos encounter each other in a mountain village. Memories trace backwards through Schumann’s Kinderszenen and Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worte. Flies in a tavern drop out of the air, dead from boredom, to the sound of Shostakovich’s last string quartet. And a random Polish booze-buddy raves about Szymanowski’s Stabat Mater.

Finally, the silver-sparkling stars of Bach’s Prelude in C-sharp Major ring out from the basement of the tavern, before we hear the whole piano recital. Through the course of the concert, that irascible pianist, in the face of a sunken church steeple, attains final certainty - from Bach to Schönberg, from Schubert to Liszt’s B-minor Sonata, and as an encore, Debussy’s La cathédrale engloutie.

Have a pleasant journey, and arrive safely at your destination!

Albrecht Selge, Die trunkene Fahrt, Roman. Rowohlt Berlin 2016.