Magnus Granberg - Es schwindelt mir, es brennt mein Eingeweide (2018)

In 2015 Christoph Schiller brought together a large ensemble in Basel to perform a work of mine, ‘How Deep is the Ocean, How High is the Sky?’, which was later released on Another Timbre. Several members of that ensemble felt it would be good to do something more. Then last year two of them, d’incise and Cyril Bondi, organised a lovely residency at Fondation l’Abri in Geneva in the last week of August, and they asked me to contribute a new piece that we could work on during the residency. The week ended with a concert presenting all the pieces which had been developed during the residency, and the CD of ‘Es schwindelt mir…’ in fact consists of the recording of the performance at that concert.

Around this time for some reason I had a long period when I’d listen to a particular record by Frank Sinatra, ’No One Cares’, more or less every night after having finished work and put my son to bed. There are many lovely songs on this album, but I became especially attached to the last track on the album, ’None but the Lonely Heart’. This turned out to be an arrangement of a very well-known song by Tchaikovsky, a fact which had somehow had escaped me over the years. And then I realised that Schubert had set the same poem by Goethe, ’Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt’ from the novel 'Wilhelm Meister’s Apprentice', to music on no less than six occasions, among these the fourth song of the cycle ’Gesänge aus Wilhelm Meister’ which was published in 1826. I guess these are all well-known facts for the erudite, but I confess they were new to me at the time.

Anyhow, once I’d discovered Schubert’s admittedly well-known setting, Sinatra and Tchaikovsky both faded into the background and I became obsessed with Schubert's version, especially the first five or six bars of the introduction. So I took this song and some of its materials as a point of departure for the new piece. But the title itself, ’Es schwindelt mir, es brennt mein Eingeweide', is borrowed from a part of the song from which I actually didn’t take any source materials. So that, roughly, is the background of the piece and how it came about.