Fieberphantasie

With the title of this composition, Fever Fantasy, Jörg Widmann refers to its musical air: ‘I often feel Robert Schumann‘s melodic shape to be like the amplitude of a temperature curve: nervous, flickering, feverish, an infinite number of small and large wave crests and troughs within the principal line.’ The composer approaches this sound phenomenon with a setting for acoustic instruments. Nevertheless, he succeeds in conjuring up very unusual sound spectrums. Over long sections, the notation of this score mirrors the musical progressions, containing no concrete pitches but detailed performance instructions instead. Slowly, individual tones emerge from ascending pizzicato lines, colourless sound surfaces, sounds of harmonics roughened by tremolos, and virtuoso clarinet scales, tones that do not reveal their origin until the work ends: C - F - E - D sharp, the beginning of Schumann’s first violin sonata.