Architecture is frozen music, Schopenhauer is said to have once said, perhaps Schelling was too. My father, himself an architect, likes the comparison. Well-ordered proportions here and there, a perfect harmony or a deliberately placed dissonance, sometimes set in stone, sometimes in tones – in the meantime, synaesthetic thinking has gone somewhat out of fashion.
For me, frozen music has always been Schubert, the “Winter Journey” with the verses of Wilhelm Müller, especially the song “Gefrorne Tears”. The icy clinking piano in short chords, the shivering voice, which takes note of its own weeping with dismay, short downward motives, holey pauses, last words, stalactite cave singing – beautiful to shudder.
The song also contains a deep truth about the pain of being abandoned, whether it’s a lost love or a lost, lost life. And about the grief that leaves you speechless until you are completely alien to yourself.
Schubert undertakes a winter journey into the innermost being, paints a clay frost flower with a flowering time of a good two minutes. Frost flowers have fascinated me since I was a child, these tiny filigree structures when we sat in the reasonably warm car in the cold winter and breathed on the windows.
They looked like fern fronds, shimmered like mountain crystals and opened up magical worlds. If you got close enough, their microcosm looked like a macrocosm, a branching river landscape, the Mekong Delta in delicate snow white.
Just don’t get too close to the rhizomes, and the spell would melt away under the warmth of your breath. Just as in Schubert’s song the flamethrower causes a sudden glowing anger to thaw. Which in the end can not only be read synesthetically, it also carries the political message of rebellion in times of restoration.
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