The mysterious count and his festival

Born into an aristocratic family in 1905 and raised at Valva Castle near Naples, he bears the title Conte d'Ayala Valva. "Even as a three-year-old, he used to spend hours improvising on the piano with his feet, arms and elbows and did not want to be disturbed under any circumstances," says pianist Marianne Schroeder, who knew Scelsi personally and worked with him.

As a pianist, he was largely self-taught. He later studied composition with three teachers, with Debussy specialist Giacinto Sallustio in Rome, with Egon Köhler, a Scriabin supporter, in Geneva and twelve-tone technique with Schoenberg pupil Walter Klein in Vienna. These studies took place outside the academic world, from which he deliberately kept his distance and was therefore sometimes despised or ridiculed. Marianne Schroeder enthusiastically recounts a 1979 concert in the Hans-Huber-Saal in Basel, in which Jürg Wittenbach performed works by Scelsi. The Japanese soprano and Scelsi specialist Michiko Hirayama was also there. In 2014, Schroeder invited the now 90-year-old singer to her first Scelsi festival at the Gare du Nord. "It was incredible: she sang a one-and-a-half-hour program with the Canti del Capricornothat were dedicated to her."

During the Second World War, Scelsi struggled with nervous problems and became increasingly interested in spiritualism, turning to Far Eastern teachings and practising yoga intensively. He believed that he received his music as messages from the beyond, for example from Hindu deities: "I am only a medium in the service of something much greater than myself," he says in the film portrait The first movement of the unmoved from the year 2018.

He was in search of microtonalities, always looking for frictions, minor seconds and sevenths. In 1965, he stopped improvising on the piano and began working with the Ondiola, the first electronic instrument on which pitches could be set.

Marianne Schroeder, a piano teacher at the Basel Music School at the beginning of her career, states: "I only felt happy when I started playing modern music. I was always successful with it". She studied Bartók, Stockhausen, Feldman and Cage. "Scelsi was a logical consequence of this," she is convinced. After the initial experience of the Scelsi concert in Basel, it took another five years before she plucked up the courage to call the master: "In 1984, I was in Darmstadt when it came like a bolt of lightning: now I have to play Scelsi." The following year, she met the master in Rome. He asked three questions: "How old are you? What kind of music do you play? Do you do yoga?" She didn't do yoga, but started soon after Scelsi's death (1988) and still practises it intensively today: "Scelsi was extremely kind and calm, someone who only wanted the best for you." As he always worked at night, you could only meet him after 4 pm. Scelsi often asked: "Did you improvise today?" It was extremely important to him that a musician should let the music emerge from within.

You couldn't listen to his music for more than ten minutes at a time, Scelsi said, it was too eruptive. Today we've moved on, says Schroeder: "There's something emotionally right about Scelsi. There is something natural, fundamental and unaffected about it."
 

After a concert in Rome, Schroeder had her second important inspiration: "Now I'm going to do a festival." She found a project manager in Anja Wernicke, and the first three-day edition was successfully staged in January 2014. With the exception of 2015, the festival has always been hosted by Gare du Nord. However, the first day traditionally takes place at Fachwerk Allschwil, as was the case this year on February 2. First on the program was a singing workshop with Amit Sharma, followed by a reading from Scelsi's autobiographical work, Il sogno 101. The music was entirely dedicated to the piano. The following were performed Cinque incantesimi (1953), performed by Marija Skender. These pieces are among the composer's best-known piano works. They were written over several years in nightly improvisations that were recorded on tape. Action Music 1-4 (1955), interpreted by Giusy Caruso, dates from the time when Scelsi was inspired by the action painting of Jackson Pollock, among others, in New York. Marianne Schroeder set the final point with I Capricci di TY, Suite No. 6 (1938-39), which are intended to describe the caprices of his wife Dorothy.

From 7 to 9 May, three more festival days are planned in Allschwil (the Gare du Nord is not available this time for organizational reasons). A masterclass entitled "The Art of Scelsi Singing" with the soprano and student of Michiko Hirayama, Maki Ota, has been confirmed. Marianne Schroeder is bubbling over with enthusiasm and program ideas, but also regrets that she can only make short-term plans at the moment due to her work overload: "A dream would be Scelsi's monumental early works La nascita del verbo with orchestra and choir, but that takes at least two years of preparation."