Die Vogelscheuchen

The gardener‘s primary concern is to maintain law and order in his garden to which birds keep gaining entry. Yet despite his concerns his daughter keeps encouraging them into the garden. Feeling helpless, the father begins to construct a scarecrow; once it‘s fi nished, the world of the scarecrows comes into being. The world of the scarecrows is populated by strange scarecrows; the abbess introduces them to the gardeners daughter who is attempting to learn the language of the scarecrows before being forced to marry the prefect of the scarecrows who has fallen in love with her. During the increasingly confused wedding procession she manages to escape. The gardener refuses his daughter entry into his house. The scarecrows appear to carry her back to her realm but it‘s too late, the birds are involving themselves in the proceedings and attack the gardener. Only one solution remains: the gardener himself turns into a scarecrow to keep the birds out of the garden.

"… this is material for a ballet. And Reimann has realized the sound for it. An amazing sound, lifted from an orchestra with large divisi strings, soloistically and chordally interlocked winds and countless percus- sion instruments played by nine players. Two characters dominate the sonorous scene: the whispering and murmuring of the strings playing glissandos in harmony as a symbol of sounds of a fl ock of birds; a pandemonium of rattling, jingling and hissing noises as an image of the lifeless underworld. From these two musical visions, Reimann derives the sonorous forms of the three acts and 25 scenes with a phenomenal hearing accuracy. Sound and rhythm shape into forms; thick tone clusters take shape. Melody in the traditional sense is omitted; but the colours, tone clusters, maintained complexes form a kind of underlying melody. It serves, almost automatically, as an orientation for the dance-like gesture to the mimed form. It is an entirely personal other-worldly music far away from modern conformism which only looks for a connection to examples in the ‘Suite’ of the underworld scene by means of quotations and collages of Bach, Bonporti and Schubert." (H. H. Stuckenschmidt, FAZ, 13 October 1970)