In the footsteps of Coimbra

The style of European classical music has also been composed on distant islands in the past. For example, the Riemann Music Dictionary mentions the composer Otto Jägermeier, born in Munich in 1870, who emigrated from war-torn Europe to Madagascar in 1915 and composed symphonic poems such as In the jungle or the Suite tananariviennenamed after the Malagasy capital Tananarive. And recently there has also been talk of another islander who wrote his scores far away from our civilization. He went by the Portuguese-Spanish name José Diego Coimbra and lived, it is said, from 1824 to 1865 on the island of Mondariz, a small volcanic island in the South Atlantic, five days' journey by mail boat from the South American mainland.

Coimbra is an apparition that arouses curiosity. An eccentric who you would hardly have heard of if he had not been made the ghostly protagonist of a novel. The author is Yorck Kronenberg, who was born in 1973 in Reutlingen, Swabia. Mondariz has now published his fifth novel. As a writer and concert pianist, he has a double talent. This makes him uniquely capable of both telling an exciting story about the long-dead composer and expressing himself with musical expertise. According to Kronenberg, the scores were long kept in the island's main town, a sleepy settlement from the colonial era, where the inhabitants do a poor job of keeping the memory of the exotic composer alive. In the hope that tourists will come one day, they have set up his house, the Casa Coimbra, as a small memorial and thus saved it from creeping decay.

Between hyperrealism and fiction

Kronenberg's book offers the reader a sly mixture of hyper-realistic description and fiction. The first-person narrator, who we can assume is the author himself, visited the island ten years ago to investigate the composer's footsteps. Now he has come back for a second time to take a closer look at the scores and the documents stowed away in old trunks and to reappraise Coimbra's living environment biographically. He delves into village life and the colonial history of the island, but has mixed experiences with the suspicious locals during his research. While he tries to find his feet in this foreign world, his European past catches up with him in the form of text messages from his former partner. She had accompanied him on his first visit to the island, but now the two are thousands of kilometers apart in a painful separation process. These two levels are skillfully intertwined in the narrative.

Despite all the practical shortcomings and heartache, the figure of the composer and his music gradually take shape. When the narrator leaves the island again on a barge at the end, he is a few experiences richer. By immersing himself in a foreign land, he has also plunged into his inner self. He now knows that the world of the islanders will always remain closed to him, he has distanced himself from his ex-girlfriend in distant Europe, and the music of Coimbra has become more familiar to him, intertwined with the inscrutable reality of the island. He takes a few scores home with him as trophies.
And here they are in the hands of the author and pianist Yorck Kronenberg. He has described them knowledgeably in his book, for example the great symphony in C sharp minor, a late work from 1862, in which the conductor can ask the musicians to only fake the playing so that the movements continue but no sound is heard. Here, Coimbra anticipates the experiments in instrumental theater that avant-garde composers such as Dieter Schnebel were to take up again a hundred years later.

In a musical-literary Sunday soiree at the Künstlerhaus Boswil on August 30, 2020, visitors were able to gain a concrete impression of Coimbra's hitherto literary existence and his music. Kronenberg and the Casal Quartet performed two of the composer's works, with the author reading a few passages from his book in between. Christine Egerszegi, President of the Advisory Board of the Boswil Foundation, chatted with him and guided the audience through the program.

Kronenberg is a reader and conversationalist who is a pleasure to listen to. As a pianist, he takes full risks. This was particularly evident in Bach's Piano Concerto in D minor. It was played in a version with string quartet at the end of the evening. At a brilliant tempo and technically well-equipped, he chased through the outer movements, the quartet always close on his heels and quick to react. One more rehearsal would have done the whole thing good. In the middle movement, the pianist was also able to show off his introverted side to advantage.

The core of the concert and the audience's curiosity were, of course, the two original works by the mysterious composer. At the beginning, Kronenberg played Dos Estudios para Piano. The first etude trumps with motoric chord repetition in the left hand and sweeping, monophonic melodies in the right hand. The second is freer in movement and harmonically more colorful. Both sound like an innocent anticipation of the rhythm pieces by Prokofiev or Bartók. The following string quartet was a world premiere. The four-movement work is imbued with a warm emotionality, a thoughtful tone prevails. A uniform, polyphonically layered network of voices characterizes the first movement. In the second, individual expressive figurations emerge, which then take on a concrete character in the form of laments in the long final movement with descending lines and torn-off small glissandi. It seems as if Coimbra had anticipated the pain of love of his later biographer.

What are we to make of the musical achievements of this loner, who wrote his scores undauntedly on a godforsaken tropical island in the South Atlantic, in the knowledge that he would probably never be heard in his lifetime? Anyone reading Kronenberg's novel is drawn step by step into this improbable situation. One begins to believe in the existence of Coimbra, behind the fiction a new, strong reality becomes visible. However, the listening impression of his compositions only partially confirms the promises of uniqueness that the book makes. The fiction remains stronger in this case. Nevertheless, the discovery of Mondariz's musical and literary world was well worth the trip to Boswil.

PS: The composer Otto Jägermeier is a musicological-lexigraphical joke. The island of Mondariz cannot be found on any map.
Yorck Kronenberg: Mondariz. Dörlemann publishing house, Zurich 2020, 283 pages