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Gedichte + Musikstück 1914 (1908/14)

Adolf Wölfli

Adolf Woelfli

Album title: Gelesen und vertont
Title: Gedichte (Track 08) + Musikstück 1914 (Track 09)
Publisher: Bernische Kunstgesellschaft and Adolf Wölfli-Stiftung, Kunstmuseum Bern
Date: 1908-14, publ.1978
Medium: record 30 cm + booklet
Cover: after A.Woelfli
Performers: Anton Bruhin, Trio Aarebögeler


The work of the Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli was not known and appreciated until many years after his death. The long-playing record Gelesen und vertont (Read and set to music), published in 1978, gives a partial insight into his literary work. The source for this is notebooks in which Wölfli collected and stored his literary work.

"In 1908 Wölfli began his narrative piece, his life work, on which he worked with few interruptions until he died in 1930. Utilizing a complex weave of prose, poetry, onomatopoeia, order tables, new numbers, drawings, collages and musical compositions, he transforms his childhood into a magnificent past and his future into a personal utopia." (adolfwoelfli.ch, 29.03.2019)

The poems to be heard here are from early notebooks from 1908 onwards and from the collection of works Trauer-Marsch, which he compiled in the last years of his life; they are read by Anton Bruhin.

The musical piece that follows the poems comes from Wölfli's musical notes. The musicians Kjell Keller and Peter Streiff interpreted the notations and created pieces for clarinet, hand organ and violin from them, traditional folk instrumentation at the time of composition.

PS