KOSTAS E. TSIROPOULOS

ABSTRACT

FROM

M U S I C

Personal notes

inspired by

Anton Bruckner’s

Symphonies

Translated from Greek by ©Mauro Giachetti

PRELUDE

When he lost the person who had taken him to the world,

All his senses were saddened by silence. The entire creation,

gagged by the mystery of death and the paradox of love,

remained silent for him. It costs us great fatigue to get ready

to face our personal death, and maybe we are not even able

to put up with the death of our dear ones.

In that silence which lasted many months, in the exuberant Greek light

he started to hear a mysterious sound that was calling him back to life,

a voice that was however going continually astray.

It sounded like the voice of a ghost, the voice

he had been searching for, and it was constituted by musical sounds since words were dead for him: they had not been able to compete

with death and to win him their own way.

But listening to music had become intolerable for him.

Each sound which fell on him was like the contact of a foreign body

on an open wound.

But one day, in that vault of the time where his tears had been gathering, resounded some themes – fragments of a forgotten music –

of a music loved in another life, a life he had abandoned forever:

they were fragments from Bruckner’s Symphonies.

He took them with him to the island where he started to listen to them

in agony until, overwhelmed by pain, he tried to ascend to the world again. It was then that he decided to record that endeavor

by means of words, images and symbolic meanings. But he

resorted to words again humiliated, as he had no other way to express himself.

He knew that had he listened to those Symphonies under different circumstances, he would have had dissimilar emotions and thoughts.

Especially important are the moment and the manner in which

one comes across a musical work – possessed by numerous meanings by its very nature – as is the case with the sublime, enthused Bruckner’s compositions.

These notes, written musically and not thoughtfully, cope with

some questions, doubts, emotions but mainly with man’s incessant query about death and his own destiny in the world.

Because it is this the center towards which each word is inclined.

Anton Bruckner’s grievous presence had been

a wonderful consolation to him. With his soul fascinated

by loneliness and passion, that young peasant born in Ausfelden,

Austria, in 1824, died in Vienna in 1896, where he now reposes

In his beloved church of Sankt Florian. As timid and simple

as he was, he might have even appeared mediocre, but he

concealed in himself a soul thirsting for love. Saddened by

his enemies, pressed by the needs of life, persistently bent over

his harmonium, he erected and kept open by means of

his music in all his life that stairway which allowed him to ascend

to heaven, fellow citizen of the angels, brother of the saints,

beneficiary of the glory of God.

For his virile souls prays and gives thanks,

Kostas E. Tsiropoulos

FIRST SYMPHONY

The Dreamer

Allegro – Adagio

I had decided to be silent. I was a tree cut to the quick

and words, unable to incarnate the mystery I was living, were

falling off me like dry bark. I had been betrayed by a language on

which I had established my life, betrayed by God and by those

Saints to whom I had addressed my words weeping. All things

considered we are nothing but a silence which becomes deeper

and deeper till it disappears into the oblivion

that generated us. God will remember us again

when we forget, when we are forgotten. The more we remember

the more painful will be the way in which we will hide into silence

so that no word may reach us.

Then you just lifted with a grave hand the gloomy stone which

sealed all creation and your sounds hit me like rain

full on the chest.

The soul awoke again astonished, words awoke again

resurrected, words are our destiny; we are nothing but words;

words terrified by the frost of death, membranes on which our

heart and our conscience strike to question God incessantly.

You cracked my silence, the silence of heaven, you,

Anton Bruckner, engineer of souls, shepherd of sounds.

The human body, slipping into death, engraved in the memory

a tomb: in it are contained all those who loved the body and who,

troubled, weep. But then the course of life, snatched out of

creation’s entrails, re-echoed with deep sounds.

Those who love are afraid. They despise death even if

they do not have the means to win him. Immersed into life,

they live the delirium of the memory till the flow of sounds

and notes in that livid twilight makes the shell of their

bereavement crack and rouses in the body the night of the senses.

As soon as the soul awakes from its profound sleep and

sees the world again, it shivers and enveloped by a sea of

intelligible sounds, it covers the body with tears to confirm

the bitter joy of the senses.

The one who cried knows. It was said that after remaining

Three days in the tomb He brought awakening to

the Underworld to liberate the souls gagged by death, so

they could twitter. Three days, three months, three years

of the mortals, the cruel time of the tears which purify the

conscience. Nights and days awaiting the Sign, black venomous

waters the soul will have to drink and in which it will drown. –

Whereto are you dragging me with your sad soul while

you conduct the sounds with your hand?

Man knows the end which is expecting him, he knows

the absolute silence which is awaiting him.

Enduring his own destiny, he lives his senses again.

At the height of midday he harvests white ears of corn on the sea,

glaucous roses, golden engravings of the body in the summer ashes.

But as he proceeds speechless into the night he discovers

above himself the obscurity of the world. Light induces him

to believe in immortality; but darkness will reveal to him shining tombs under the moon.

The safety of the soul is destroyed. Serenity, terrible moment,

pretense of eternity, the mortal body cries of love and

palpitating discovers the senses.

(Who was observing you in the ovary of the night as

you let out sounds and shone? Agony and ecstasy.

Who was listening to you ad you cried the name of God

and the world shivered? Silence). Whoever gives himself up

to love believing in body’s immortality, is lost.

Passion is troubling the world, that’s why the sounds intervene

to ward off deception and show a wordless, naked soul.

Truth, at work in the flesh, devours the bread of life till the

statue collapses enveloped with seawater. Forget! Tonight

the music is revealing death’s melancholy, the nostalgia

of immortality. Desperate voices of love emerge on the surface

repeating the sorrowful question: why a man who loves has to die?

In the great summer light the sound/knife arises to strike

in the middle of the chest the silence of the soul.

Serenity of tears of blood. The unsuspecting creation wavers,

but the sea mirrors remain void in front of the inspired bodies.

Bodies do not exist, we do not exist! Quicksilver, filter

of death, poured into the veins of the world is poisoning

the souls with mirages. Can’t you feel the poison of music prepared

for you by a tormented soul in the world?

In font of the mirror-sorcerer, the dreamer of the summer nature

sees his own shadow crumble over the stone of death.

Ashes cover the warm bodies that every night row towards

absolute oblivion, towards utmost silence. They engrave a tomb

to love each other fiercely. Death’s despair speaks with passion,

with passion and the cross. Resurgam.

Scherzo

From the gloomy meadow of the dreams emerged with you

one morning the world, splendor of sounds, oblivion of the angry

night on your flesh.

Beyond the statues the vastness of the sea; only music

knows immensity. The stones live austerely their shape

and the gardens where in the summertime the basil plants shiver,

border on the winter of creation. You, with these sounds, break

your limits and are in danger. Here, in the marginal

mystery of the day, you will dream, and all that sleep

takes away from you during the night, will be revealed

to you by excruciating sounds.

He opened his eyes