For a long time, composing for the organ seemed to be discredited among post-war composers, particularly in Germany, but not so much in France, where Olivier Messiaen stands out as the figure who revived the French organ tradition after the fin de siècle and carried it forward. As an innovator, he liberated church music, especially organ music, from the spirit of restoration. The conditions for this seemed to be more favorable in France than in Germany, where the self-image of faith and religion is very rational and thus very secular. It follows a natural-philosophical-Cartesian approach, committed to the thinking of the Enlightenment, deeply skeptical of mythologically transfigured excesses and religious-ideological sediments. In Germany, many serious composers with an awareness of history saw the church as an ideological space and, with it, the organ, both discredited not least because of their burdened role in National Socialism, the latter through the youth and singing movement. It was György Ligeti, who never cared about conventions, even historically burdened ones, but sometimes simply swept them aside by means of semantic reinterpretations (musica reservata), understood the church interior as a creative artistic space and, with his epoch-making organ work Volumina, discovered the organ as a rich terrain for musical innovation, thereby initiating a renaissance of organ music in Germany in the late 1960s (Bremen 1968: pro musica nova).
My intense preoccupation with the organ has a strong autobiographical component. Even as a small boy of five, listening to Olivier Messiaen's music proved to be a very formative moment for my later life. A very difficult and disruptive childhood and adolescence prevented me from learning to play the organ. After such an unfulfilled life as a disoriented young man seeking guidance in faith, the profession of church musician seemed to offer me spiritual support. The realization that I would not be able to pursue this career plunged me into a serious crisis. Composing for the organ seemed to be a way out of this crisis. I owe my extensive organ oeuvre to this circumstance. And in many ways, it shaped my aesthetic thinking, based on a rational, enlightened attitude (see above). In this sense, my full-length organ cycle superverso is imbued with a theosophical program, committed to the theosophical world cosmos that also underpins Olivier Messiaen's organ works, the triad of world existence as the course of the world in its continuously evolving transformation. Messiaen was therefore a particular inspiration for this cycle.
This Cartesian-natural-philosophical approach is rational in its secular objectification, spiritual in its strong belief in the divine ground of being, which Baruch de Spinoza once called “substance.” This spirituality feeds into the secular-rational approach to religion that has always strongly influenced the intellectual and cultural history of France. In its ontological discursiveness, it is also a Jewish one. Spinoza's “substance” as existing is not tangible to the human mind, to its senses, in its all-encompassing infinity. This substance appears as the cause, as the origin of all that is, for example, of man as an individual. It is divine, the creator of all natural existence. The constituents of natural being come together in their diversity (wholeness) in the triad of the relationship of all individual things to the whole of movement and, further, of change as a processual principle of formation. From this, the trinitas of body, soul, and spirit is derived as the discursive level of individual being. For each human individual, this gives birth to the corresponding unique “divine plan.”
My approach to the organ is similar to that of Olivier Messiaen, both technically and in terms of its strong emotional impact. The technical approach is based on an analysis of the rich timbral palette of this wonderful instrument and a completely unconsciously developed and very personal hermeneutics of colors (colors of light, for example: “sharp, glistening” in the 1' register = the eternal light that shines brightly on everything, even the apocalyptic findings that keep peeking out), which are reflected compositionally in the form of specific register combinations. As with Messiaen, specific melody, chord, and structural configurations also stand for corresponding semantic references.
My composing has also developed through fortunate encounters with several pioneers who are leading the renaissance of the organ in new music: Reimund Böhmig, Hans-Ola Ericsson, Christoph Maria Moosmann, and Zsigmond Szathmáry, who have interpreted my works outstandingly and continue to do so. This CD presents some of the organ works that Reimund Böhmig, the magician of timbres among organists, also interprets on small organs, which borders on a miracle given the sometimes orchestral style of these pieces.