"His father was a stone mason, and, at least if we can trust the information from the patient, was an intelligent man; and when he was sober also a good worker; but besides this a decided drinker who drank up his wages in 'the most notorious schnapps and fornication dives' and left his family to suffer want. Gradually he became more and more dissipated, finally turning to crime and ending up in prison. In 1875 he is said to have come back – apparently with the help of the police – to his native parish Schangnau, where he soon afterwards died in a state of delirium.
"His mother is said to have been a washerwoman. During an interview in 1895 the patient said that she led an immoral life. Nevertheless he seems to have remained attached to her.
"Adolf was born on 29th February 1864. Until he was eight years old he lived with his parents in Bern. In 1872, by his own account, he and his mother were sent with the help of the police to her native parish, the remote village of Schangnau in Emmental. His mother is reported to have been ill already on her arrival, and she died a few months later. Shortly after their arrival the boy had been taken from his mother, and he only heard of her death by chance some months later.
"One is reminded of Jeremias Gotthelf when he tells us how, at a ‘Verdinggemeinde', he was taken from his mother and given to a farmer; how at the age of eight he had to tend goats in the summer and in the winter had to do hard work in the forest; how he was often hungry, witnessed schnapps feasts and was himself seduced into drinking spirits; how as punishment for small misdemeanours and accidents ahe was bused, caned and kicked, so that he was unable to go to school, etc.
"From 1880 on he was a farm hand. Between 1881 and 1882 he worked for a farmer in Zäziwil, where the poor little farm lad, hardly eighteen, fell head over heels in love with a neighbour's daughter. When the girl's parents discovered the relationship, they forbade her to see him. This renunciation must have pained Wölfli greatly: 'I brooded, even became melancholy, and did not know what to do. The same evening I rolled around in the snow out of pure lover's grief, and lamented the happiness I had so evilly been denied.'
"He traveled to Bern, where he was employed in very hard work by a farmer. But soon he was unable to bear it there either, and he now embarked on a chequered career.
"In that spring (1890) he encountered something quite new to him, something he was apparently unable even to explain to himself: one Sunday as he was wandering aimlessly in Bremgarten, he came across a 14-year-old girl deep in the forest. At all events Wölfli was suddenly seized by 'rash thoughts', approached the child, and caught her by the arm after a brief introduction, such that she began to weep. Three men and an 'old spinster' came up and prevented anything happening. On 12th May 1895 Wölfli committed a new offence, stealing into a house in the town and trying to engage in some immorality with a little girl of only three and a half. He was surprised by the parents and handed over to the police.
"On 3rd June 1895 he was committed by warrant to the asylum Waldau for a mental examination. The declaration of the experts, which was made on 8th October 1895, concluded that Wölfli was mentally ill and of unsound mind, as well as a danger to public safety, whereupon the process was interrupted and the case files were sent to the responsible official in the cantonal government. On 23rd October he decided that Wölfli was to be placed in an asylum and kept there until he was 'mentally cured and no longer dangerous to public safety'. [Wölfli remained there until his death in 1930 – ed.]
"For the first five years in Waldau the symptoms of his illness became more and more pronounced. In the spring of 1899 we read for the first time that for a period he has been busily sawing firewood, and in November that year that he 'passes the time drawing'. In the second period it is recorded again and again how he draws, writes, composes etc. enthusiastically. For years his state of mind then alternates between irritation, innumerable hallucinations, threatening behaviour, scolding and banging about and serious acts of violence. For long periods he remains calm, when he has enough material to draw and is not disturbed by others.
"Third period: On 29th September 1917 he was transferred to solitary confinement beside the guard room on the second floor. He had no concern but to ensure that his huge heaps of papers and drawings were transferred undamaged to his new place of residence. And there he settled down again.
"But he still hallucinates a great deal. Almost every night he has to scold his voices for a while." (Walter Morgenthaler. From the liner notes.)
"The long succession of awards that Per Nørgård (b. 1932) has received for his compositions shows how important he is considered to modern music – and not only Danish music. His abundant output of symphonic and chamber music as well as his five operas to date shed their radiance far beyond the north of Europe and out into the world.
"Per Nørgård was born on 13th July 1932 in Gentofte in Greater Copenhagen. At a very early stage his teacher in composition, the Danish symphonist Vagn Holmboe, equipped him with the principle of musical ‘metamorphosis', which he saw could be developed further during his study of among other things the works of Sibelius. In 1956 he spent a year studying in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. From 1958 he was a teacher himself, first at the Carl Nielsen Academy of Music in Odense, later at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, and finally at the Royal Academy of Music in Århus, where he established an important centre for contemporary music. For many young Danish composers he became a mentor who was to influence their whole professional life. Between 1975 and 1980 he went on several journeys to Indonesia, where he immersed himself in Balinese gamelan music. It was first and foremost the percussion instruments that interested him, as in the gengs and chalungs – in versions specially made in Bali for Per Nørgård – used in 'The Divine Circus'.
"From his student years until the years around 1980 Nørgård's career as a composer can be seen as a continuous development where the aim is to create a closed harmonic totality. In purely technical terms, the infinity series, which he discovered in 1959, plays an important role. This is a principle for generating pitches which uses self-identical units to create a melodicharmonic sound universe. In this context the composer himself speaks of the musical weaving of an 'infinity tapestry'. At the rhythmic level he based his compositions on organic organizational forms, especially the Golden Section. For the musical theatre he created three operas in this period: 'The Labyrinth' (1963/67), 'Gilgamesh' (1971/72) and 'Siddharta' (1974-1979/1989).
"In 1979 Per Nørgård visited an exhibition with works by Adolf Wölfli, and this led to a crucial turning-point in his way of composing. Inspired by Wölfli's rule-free art Nørgård departed from many of the organizational forms he had cultivated hitherto, turning towards a more subjective, spontaneous and at the same timeless bright, harmonious way of writing: 'The encounter with Wölfli's art (and his life!) concluded a harmonic decade (1970-1980), in which my gaze had been directed towards a cosmological-harmonic totality that was strongly based on the discovery of the ‘infinity series' (1959). After immersing myself in the multidimensional universe of the infinity series or the infinity tapestry, I experienced the encounter with Wölfli's chaotic art as a mental dive into a different, dark world – eerie, unpredictable, but fascinating and above all highly specific. That is, a 180-degree turn away from the preceding ‘light-period'!' (Per Nørgård in February 2007).
"Among the works written in connection with Wölfli were the choral work 'Wie ein Kind' (1980), the Fourth Symphony with the subtitle 'Indischer Roosen-Garten – Chineesischer Hexensee' (1981) and the opera 'The Divine Circus' (1982). Around the time of the opera the piece 'I Ching' for solo percussion also arose, and in certain passages it coincides with the opera; its fourth movement is identical with the virtuoso percussion prelude. In the opera percussion instruments generally play a leading role: besides a synthesizer and an electronically amplified cello the ‘orchestral' ensemble requires six percussionists. After the world premiere in Århus in 1983 the opera was performed in among other places Edinburgh and St. Gall. The German premiere took place in Lübeck in 2007, and this production was also shown in Bern. (Katharina Kost. From the liner notes.)
"As long as Orpheus sings for the god of the underworld, Tantalus forgets his cruel thirst, Sisyphus sits down on his boulder, the voracious bird abandons Prometheus' liver, and Ixion's wheel stands still. These harshly punished people's compulsive actions end for a while. The rulers of Hades are even so touched that they grant the singer an extraordinary honour: he can boast that he is the first to liberate a human being from the clutches of death with his music.
"Something similar happens to Adolf Wölfli, the protagonist of Per Nørgård's opera 'The Divine Circus'. When he finally begins to write and draw, the figures of insanity and memory within him and around him fall calm. Doufi, Saint Adolph and Saint Adolph II, Margritt, Mutti and all the ‘Vögeli' (the birds): those that have tormented and humiliated him before now turn out to be impressed and to look up to him. In both cases, it is the miracle of art that takes place.
"The unusual fate of the historical Adolf Wölfli has fascinated whole generations. As early as the beginning of the twentieth century artists were inspired by his grandiose oeuvre. At the beginning of the 1980s he became an operatic hero for a number of composers. Per Nørgård has dedicated a whole group of works to him. But much about this ‘operatic hero' is strange: a man who has molested little girls or at least intended to do so; a man who in his delusions of grandeur sought and found a sad replacement for a bungled life. Is that the kind of thing we want to see on an opera stage?
"In many respects Nørgård's opera is exceptional: even the ‘orchestral ensemble' (unusual even for a music drama work of the twentieth century) – six percussionists, synthesizer and electronically amplified cello – makes you literally prick up your ears. At first glance it seems confusing that the Wölfli figure is split into the four singers, and that the two female singers are constantly changing into different female figures.
"But precisely in terms of content the opera is anything but isolated within the music drama tradition. Despite the fact that Adolf Wölfli is a unique phenomenon, the figure is also closely related to many other figures of literary and theatrical history. And at the formal musical level too Nørgård again and again takes up themes familiar to us all. The subject, the attempt at child molestation, certainly pushes against the boundaries of certain taboos; but these only lie parallel to, not beyond our familiar boundaries. For about 200 years it has even been common to see murder on the opera stage. The opera's Wölfli thus shares his particular fate with many stage figures – they are all eccentric outsiders, ostracized from the community, but also gifted with special abilities.
"For several centuries insanity has had its place on the European stage. English Restoration drama had its mad scenes with their so-called 'mad songs', already to be found in all their facets, from the comic-grotesque to the tragic, in Shakespeare's plays. In the works of Handel or Donizetti the tradition is carried on. The motif can also be glimpsed in Georg Büchner's Woyzeck and Alban Berg's Wozzeck, where the title figure first hears voices and later commits a crime of passion: when the world is no longer bearable, especially when the existential themes of love and jealous play their part, life is invaded by madness.
"For the dramatist madness offers interesting opportunities to breach existing conventions, and to look for new, more direct forms of expression. In music theatre this usually already begins in the text: when Baroque opera heroes go mad with jealousy, the verses become disordered, strophes are omitted, rhymes are missing. Unfamiliar mixtures of recitative and aria, changing keys or music that begins to revolve obsessively around the same thought help to express how the hero is 'out of' his or her mind, as for example in Deianira's mad scene in Handel's 'Hercules' (1745), where the sentence 'Let me be mad' still recalls the old English tradition.
"In his opera 'The Divine Circus' Per Nørgård similarly uses musical devices to illustrate a worldview that deviates from the norm. And he too takes his point of departure in an ‘irregular' text with grammatical, spelling and semantic ‘errors' – the ones in Wölfli's original texts. Unlike the composer's earlier works, which arose on the basis of the fractal system of the ‘infinity series' or ‘infinity tapestry', 'The Divine Circus' in its musical shape transgresses the rules for long passages. Conventions are only important when associative quotations are interpolated, in parallel with a collage principle that is also found in Wölfli.
"In addition, the composer, through the hero's multiple characters, creates dramatic scope for himself, giving the real Adolf Wölfli three extra personalities (Doufi, Saint Adolph and Saint Adolph II) makes Wölfli's psychological universe a musical theatre in itself. Wölfli can sing duets, trios and quartets with himself. But all the things that only opera can do by means of ensemble singing serve to characterize the split personality: the musically shaped simultaneity of empathy, inconsistency, rebellion, resignation, defiant protest, fond interest and dissociation etc.
"But the representation of the deviant only becomes interesting because a truth thus arises that remains invisible when one is dealing with the ‘normal'. In this respect too Nørgård has had predecessors in his view of Wölfli, and not only in terms of the appreciation that Wölfli's art has received after World War II through Jean Dubuffet, who made his art famous as art brut; the interest shown by ‘rational' people in the odd and strange is considerably older. Madness/folly and genius/wisdom have long been regarded as closely related: we need only think of the jester who proclaims his wisdom to the highest ruler, or the ‘noble savage' who shows the European warped by civilization how the true natural mind works; perhaps too of the melancholy genius or the disturbedly visionary saint. They all have a long tradition of being splendid operatic characters.
"Much more generally speaking too, the figure of Wölfli is not unfamiliar from European drama. He can be interpreted as the hero who guiltlessly becomes guilty, that is as a tragic hero. True, Wölfli does not stumble, like the incestuous patricide Oedipus, the ‘primal father' in this genre, into fateful misconceptions. Instead of the curse of the gods, one finds in him a structure of instincts and the social rejection he suffered. But as with Oedipus his story evokes in the audience the two characteristic tragic emotions fear and pity: fear of his appalling improper advances to children, and pity in view of his huge love deficit, which has tormented him throughout life. In that respect too Wölfli recalls Woyzeck/Wozzeck, with his aggression that one can at first understand, but its results that nevertheless remain loathsome. In the case of Wölfli, though, it is doubtful how much of the guilt in his misfortunes can be ascribed to the individual and how much to society. It is indisputable that the young Adolf Wölfli suffers an extraordinarily sad fate as the child of a single mother who is dependent on public support and who must later, as an orphan, toil on the farms of strangers. In that sense he is someone who has strayed from the straight path, a brother of la tra-viata, the derailed victim of a society on its way towards becoming perfectly organized, where there is no place for marginal groups. At the same time Wölfli's reaction to his situation is extreme: susceptible and irritable, he turns his frustration outward as aggression and in that respect seems rather like some perverted Don Juan, attempting to compensate for his longing for human closeness and his inability to commit to another human being by way of momentary sexual contacts with casual partners. Thus it is perhaps no coincidence that, when Wölfli in Scene 5 of Act One ('Awakening in Heaven') reels off 'Young ones and old ones alike; rich ones and poor ones; white ones, black ones, red ones and brown ones', one is reminded of the reeling off of Don Giovanni's conquests by Leporello in his ‘list aria' in Mozart's opera: 'Young and old, rich and poor, white, black, red and brown'.
"When we see Wölfli's tragic aberrations, his hopelessness, his insanity and his social marginalization, his achievement can hardly be overestimated. Through his own strength he finds his way to art, bursts his chains and arrives at belated heroic qualities. This is where we must seek the difference between him and the operatic hero driven mad by unrequited love, the dying tragic hero and the heroine who languishes away in social misery: Nørgård's opera in fact describes not a path to perdition but the way that leads through catastrophe and past it to a life beyond madness, beyond tragedy and beyond social discrimination. True, it is not the furies of the underworld that Wölfli must exorcise with his art, but his own obsessions. In the finale of the opera, though, he does experience an elevation that approaches that of a mythical hero like Orpheus: while Orpheus assumes his eternal position as a constellation in the firmament, Wölfli triumphs in a final apotheosis over all internal and external opponents. At this point Nørgård surrenders the control of the music to Wölfli himself. With the final chorus 'Hallelujah, our God has gone mad!' to a melody attributed to Wölfli himself, he withdraws as a composer and mixes in with the crowd of admirers. (Katharina Kost. From the liner notes.)
"In his opera Per Nørgård paints a picture of the schizophrenic Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930), who grew up in humiliating circumstances, was arrested for attempted rape and committed in 1895 as incurable mentally ill to the asylum at Waldau near Bern, where Wölfli began to produce a quantitatively and qualitatively overwhelming flood of writings and pictures, quite without therapeutic guidance. Over 25,000 pages he created an anti-universe that he called the 'St. Adolph Giant Creation', and which was to replace his failed life. He appears himself in this world, as among other characters the little boy Doufi and in delusions of grandeur as St. Adolph and St. Adolph II. Thanks to the attentive doctor Walter Morgenthaler, who published a book about Wölfli in 1921, the world was made aware of this ‘mad genius'. After World War II Jean Dubuffet made Wölfli's art world-famous as art brut. Today his pictures fetch large sums as works of art." (Synopsis from the liner notes.)
Performers: Stadttheater Bern, Dorian Keilhack, Andrea Stadel, Fabienne Jost, Daniel Szeili, Hubert Wild, Steffen Kubach, Bernd Gebhardt
1.1. Vorspiel
1.2. Prolog I: Ein Totschlag
1.3. Prolog II: So Silbern Tönt's
1.4. Prolog III: Gondellied
1.5. Akt I: Lobgesänge Mit Absturz
1.6. Akt I: Die Automatische Tantzplatte
1.7. Akt I: Des Luftschiffers Fall (Und Trost Des Hausarztes)
1.8. Akt I: Die Verwandlungen Der Lidia Wildermuth
1.9. Akt I: Erwachen Im Himmel (D'r Hund Zersprengt Seine Ketten)
1.10. Akt I: Katastrophe Mit Fall (Die Uhr Schlägt Zwölf)/'Wölfli - Der Unglücksfall Im Arrest' (Beginning)
2.1. Akt I: 'Wölfli - Der Unglücksfall Im Arrest' (Continued)
2.2. Akt I: Auferstehung
2.3. Akt II: Erschaffung - Ameisenfuge
2.4. Akt II: Fahrt Mit Dem Tram
2.5. Akt II: Ist Wohl Ein Unfall-Arzt Zur Stelle?
2.6. Akt II: Des Königs Kommentar
2.7. Akt II: 'Halleluja'/Schlusschor/Der Tanz Im Paradies
