Staud: On Comparative Meteorology, für Orchester

This work is the result of a startling discovery: I learned about Bruno Schulz (1892 – 1942). The only surviving works by the Polish-Jewish visionary are the two short-story collections Cinnamon Shops (Sklepy cynamonowe) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (Sanatorium pod klepsydra), along with the short story The Comet (Kometa) and a few prose fragments, letters and sketches – but his oeuvre had a meteoric impact on the world of literature, and its significance is only gradually gaining worldwide recognition.

Using fantastically exaggerated memories of his own childhood, Bruno Schulz creates a bizarre world that is a law entirely unto itself, with a hyper-realistic language of incomparable colourfulness. Outside temporal causality, Schulz dissects reality into its individual components and puts them together again in new combinations like a kaleidoscope, fractured by an individual consciousness for which prosaic literalism seems not to exist.

Hypertrophic descriptions of nature and weather and their unique reflections in the inner life of humans; questionable acts of demiurgism and uncharted realms of existence; byways and blind alleys in time – these are his themes, the foundations of his bizarre world, which is made up of the little narrator Józef, his enigmatic father Jakub, the lascivious servant Adela and a series of other peculiar figures. The heat of an August day, the violence of a stormy night (in the company of an unhinged and fulminating aunt), the fertility of the arrival of spring (and its interpretation with the help of a stamp album)... I do not exaggerate when I say that I have seen all these things with new eyes and experienced them with new senses since I started reading Bruno Schulz.

The work is inspired by my wonderful experience with Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra, and represents my attempt to trace the mysterious world of Bruno Schulz in a musical way, without duplicating or illustrating it. The title is taken from the short story A Second Autumn, in which the father of the narrator conducts the most peculiar studies of the parasitically rampant autumn wildlife and the specific climate in his area.

On Comparative Meteorology is made up of six variously short pieces, which follow each other without pause and which are set off by short fragments of text by Schulz. This work is also the first part of an orchestral diptych, which is concluded with Contrebande (On Comparative Meteorology II) – world première in 2010 with Ensemble Modern and Pierre Boulez.

Johannes Maria Staud