Breviario de Espejismos (2005)
(for guitar solo)

It is a pleasure to be able to contribute my Breviario de espejismos to Jürgen Ruck's guitar cycle on Goya's Caprichos. As an advocate of creative concert programs that raise further artistic questions beyond the mere stringing together of pieces, this wonderful project immediately appealed to me.

For me as a composer, Jürgen Ruck's idea poses not only the general question of the relationship between music and image, but rather: how do I relate compositionally to a self-contained work of art, to a coherent cosmos with its own psychological, symbolic and historical references? What behavior protects me from the danger of duplication, a banal program or the anecdotal illustration of these highly suggestive etchings? The fact that etching is a ‘small’ genre and that my tonal material is limited to the possibilities of a single instrument, the guitar, in no way defuses this question, but rather brings about an additional concentration on it.

I found the answer to these questions in the composition of an independent and equally self-contained cosmos, whose formal principle is, however, connected to the poetic level of the etching like an umbilical cord: Goya's Capricho No. 9 ‘Nadie se conoce’ (‘Nobody knows each other’) is, at first glance, a gallant scene in which a gentleman pays court to a lady. However, the disturbing moment arises when you realize that, despite the obviously intense communication, they are masked, as are the dark figures in the background. No one can really recognize their counterpart. The result is a paradox whose interpretation (psychological, philosophical, social...?) remains open and which for me constitutes the poetic substance of the picture.

It is precisely the line between knowing and not knowing that has long preoccupied me on a compositional level and becomes the original idea of musical dramaturgy in the ‘Breviario’: four tonal shapes are combined in ever new sequences. Depending on how they follow each other and how they are weighted in their duration, they are always given a different formal function that redefines the supposedly familiar material. For example, figure A would be perceived quite differently as a transition between B and C than if it formed a formal climax; A and B would appear differently depending on whether A led to B or vice versa, and so on. This phenomenon forms the starting point of a compositional game between the familiar and the surprising, in which the four figures are subject to constant mutation. The result is a small collection of mirages, of musical impressions that we think we know in their current form, but whose reality is constantly being called into question: a breviario de espejismos.