Hemligheten (swedish: The Secret)
commission by the ensemble Lipparella, supported by the Swedish Arts Council
first performance: 21/22.2.2014 at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
publisher: Svensk Musik
on poems by Tomas Tranströmer from The Great Enigma (Den stora gåtan © Bonniers 2004)
Comments - Hemligheten (The Secret)
Tomas Tranströmer's collection of poetry, The Great Enigma (2004), which consists of five poems and forty five haiku, had been with me for a long time. I had read some of them for my old father who would soon after die of Alzheimer's disease. The choice of Tranströmer's haiku/poems for a composition for ensemble Lipparella felt as if it were prepared: They opened up to musical spaces and moods, shifts between darkness and light of life, which the baroque ensemble's special articulation and timbre possibilities gave me promising opportunities to realize. I also had a strong desire to compose to my native language Swedish.
In the work, entitled Hemligheten (The Secret), ten from the forty five haiku have been chronologically selected and composed into five main parts, with two short, almost instrumental, passages between the first and last parts. There can thus be two haiku in one and the same part. Instrumental and vocal parts constantly go in and out of each other throughout the piece. The instrumental beginning and the end of the composition - yes, perhaps even the work in its entirety - has been inspired by two other Tranströmer poems from Short Poems (2002);
in the beginning of the work, from Örnklippan (Eagle Rock):
In the depths of the ground
my soul glides
silent as a comet
and its end, from Snö faller (Snow is falling):
A bridge builds itself
slowly
straight out in space
(© New Collected Poems, 2006, translated by Robin Fulton)