(Stream of life)

Intragna April 1983
dedicated to Lina Kliemand
Text: Evi Kliemand

This composition by Ermano Maggini was first performed on 6th May 1984 as part of a lecture which concluded the renovation of the church in Balzers/Liechtenstein. The event was under the patronage of the Liechtenstein Art Society. Evi Kliemand, author and visual artist, undertook to bring to the local community something of the content and design of the new glass windows which also met with scepticism. She had accompanied her artist collegue Martin Frommelt during the development of these windows and she herself contributed the design of the porch. She had written this text in 1983, which became the lecture including the poem 'Vom Lebensstrom' ('Stream of Life'). It conveyed the central idea of one of these eight glass windows: „In him was life (and in the life was the light)“ (John 1, 1-4). Ermano Maggini had chosen the poem for a choral work for the students' choir of the Kantonsschule Wiedikon. It was performed by this choir on 30th March and on 4th April 1983 in a students' concert in Wiedikon/Zurich under the direction of Werner Zumsteg. There is a live recording on cassette (today in the archive Ermano Maggini, Zentralbibliothek Zurich).
The initially mentioned lecture in Balzers was an opportunity to officially present this simple choral work to the public with the Singkreis Ulrich von Liechtenstein and to rate it as a premiere. The composer's dedication of the work to Lina Kliemand (born in 1914) had a personal relevance: this poem revives a memory from the author's early childhood when she and her mother, before falling asleep, engaged in the evening song „Alles Leben strömt aus Dir / und durchwallt in tausend Bächen / alle Welten alle sprechen / Deiner Hände Werk sind wir / / Dass ich fühle, dass ich bin …“ ('All life flows out of you / and flows through thousand streams …). This wellknown hymn finds its echo in the poem, awakened by the contemplation of one of the glass windows, with the set lines - and continues: „in ihm war / das Leben / war in ihm / / Vom Lebensstrom / erfasst, / ströme ich gegen ihn, / ströme auf den zu, / in dem das Leben war, / ströme entgegen, denn / das Leben war in ihm / und mit seiner ganzen Kraft / wachse ich hinüber./ / (in free translation: 'in him was / life / was in him. Seized by the stream of life, I flow towards him, I flow towards the one / in whom life was,/ I flow towards him,/ for life was in him/ and with all his might/ I may grow beyond …').

The abstract light and colour painting, which was the topic of the lecture, has many things in common with the spatial creations of music in an organical way. All of Maggini's works are designed for the extension of the parts; what happens to the sounds, when they float freely in the room, is part of his musical language. It is like in glass painting: without the light this flow is missing, without its organic expansion, without its mixing power and vibration only half the composition can spread. In the flow a measure is also created. Maybe the great German poetess Hilde Domin points that out when, in 1975, she writes in her essay: „Why poetry today?“ about 'the practice of an art, be it that of the word or that of pictorial thinking': 'The modern poem must be inhaled. The breath is the medium of the poem. It combines form and content. (…) The lines carry the breath of the reader. They are respiratory units (…) though also optical units, the lines are just like the blank lines.' What is addressed here, can be transferred to the music as well. Music lives on this self-generated sound space and breath.

Text and redaction:
Evi Kliemand (2018)
Translation: Thomas Batliner
Fondazione Ermano Maggini Intragna

In him was / life / was in him / /

Seized by the stream of life, / I flow towards him, / I flow towards the one / in whom life was, / I flow towards him, for / life was in him / and with all his might / I grow beyond / / A colourful stream raises much a matter a colourful world / and fear and time and all sorts. / /
Seized by the stream of life, / I flow towards him, flow towards the one, / in whom life was, / flow towards him, for life / was in him, and with all his might / I may grow beyond.

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