Der magische Tänzer

An attempt to establish a tangible plot underlying the enigmatic poem by Nelly Sachs which Heinz Holliger selected for his first music theatre work is doomed to failure. According to the poetess, she was fired in her inspiration by the fate of the Polish dancer Vaslav Nijinsky who spent more than half his life in a state of mental derangement, creating a wealth of drawings, watercolours and paintings during this period. Nelly Sachs visited an exhibition in London including pictures by Nijinsky and was captivated by the emotional expressivity of these works of art. The poetic images created by Nelly Sachs trace the ultimately failed attempt by the dancer – who is given the biblical name of Daniel in the poem – to break out of his suffocating state of isolation and disorientation.
Holliger also describes his study of Sachs’s poetry as the attempt to break “out of the introverted abbreviated forms of the years 1961 und 1962, a liberation from dogmatic constriction into an extreme complexity of form and syntax and a shimmering and yet strictly controlled tonal world”. The four protagonists of this composition are characterised by four twelve-tone rows which develop in elaborate modulation out of a basic row presented in the prelude. Taped recordings and complex tonal layering in the large-scale forces of the orchestra with 72 players further enhance the simultaneously phantasmagorical-unreal and explosive effect of this music.