The playlist for the theme Β»RefugeΒ« β from the Elbphilharmonie music lexicon. In music, the word was taken to describe a polyphonic work in which the individual parts chase and run away from each other, or in other words: they make a staggered entrance, each with the same melody, which therefore must be structured in a way that allows it to accompany itself.
Bach escaped the stresses of daily life as the church musician with this abstract composition of mathematical beauty. And the fact that he died just as he integrated his own name into the music with the notes B-A-C-H gives this work added mystique.
They were referring to year-old Valentin Sylvestrov, who went to Berlin to escape the war in his homeland. For his admirers, this is a late satisfaction, because Sylvestrov has wrangled with Soviet and Russian cultural politics his entire life β whether through twelve-tone music or the spiritual sounds of orthodox sacred music. In Los Angeles, the inventor of twelve-tone music met several other prominent intellectuals who had happily found refuge there, among them the writer Thomas Mann and the film director Billy Wilder.
Despite being relatively short, the work β through radically expressionistic stylistic devices β achieves an almost physically painful intensity, and is surely the most expressive musical exploration of the Holocaust in music history.
Banned from working because he performed with female singers? In Iran, where he was born, women have been forbidden from singing in public ever since the Islamic Revolution of But he also had the audacity to start the women-only ensemble Mahbanoo. And so, driven by necessity, the then year-old found a new home in Hamburg-Bergedorf in There is a lively Persian community here β and new inspiration for blending traditional music with European influences. Placed in a Montreal orphanage as an infant in , adopted at the age of three, later expelled from the Catholic novitiate for Β»lack of maturityΒ«, openly gay, journeys of self-discovery to Asia: this is the biography of an outsider, culminating in a tragic death at the age of 35, murdered by a prostitute in Paris.
