Leise flehen meine Lieder

January 2004: So I sat in my flat in Vienna, squandering my work again. It is incomprehensible why here of all places, any other town would have fed me better. "Franz, leave him in peace", said Ronnie and agreed to sing the "Winter Journey" for me. The hopeless psychic development the song cycle is describing may well determine my Schubert paintings. "It's called romantic-ironic despair by musicologists" I said, and thought of pink rubber gloves..
During "Vormärz" (the period between 1815 and the 1848 revolution) political and social order was the basis for inner peace. Art's function was to praise the values of intimacy and privacy. Austrian culture, dominated by local government, did not accept anything else and persecuted any "revolutionary and subversive activities". Schubert, too, witnessed his friend Senn being taken into custody for trial for fourteen months, after his writings were discovered. Facing ongoing censorship, the poet Wilhelm Müller from Dessau hid his criticism on the restauration politics of the German confederacy within his harmless sounding homeland poetry. Franz Schubert composed "Die schöne Müllerin" and "Winterreise" taken from Müller's "Waldhornisten Lieder". Censorship was reduced as a result of the revolution in 1848, twenty years after Schubert's death. Yet, these post-revolutionary changes also marked the transition from patronage to market economy, which led to art production that had to follow demand..
October 2005: It was decided that the mezzo-soprano Jacqueline Schwarz would sing the Winter Journey instead of Ronnie, accompanied by Peter Hartwig's electronic modular arrangements. "I am going to fulfill every cliché to drown in romantic ironic despair", I said to Jacqueline. There is an endless sadness circling through my paintings as there is in the "Winter Journey". Somehow we seem to be at home in this sadness and sing to it with recognition. I think also about "Fitzcarraldo", pulling a ship up a mountain. I am going to disregard the failure at the end and will go on searching for hidden paths that no one walked (back) before.
"Wounds are not shown", writes Elfriede Jelinek about Schubert. But we can still see the scars and each scar represents a part of memory…