World premiere: 24 April 1985, Würzburg, University of Music
Susanne Pfitschler / Kathirn Pfeifer / Renate Schmitt / Jürgen Schmitt / Armin Fuchs / Juan Manuel Chavez / Juliane Borsodi / Johannes Klier / Jürgen Röder / Friederike Jung / Thomas Ondrushek / Johannes Beer / Bernd Lorey / Klaus Ospald / Hermann Beyer
Duration: 20 minutes
Publisher: -

A wax statue, alone, hardened...
Pasolini

Is it true that a black condor flies over my homeland at night?
Where do the things of dreams go? Do they go into the dreams of others?
Was it where I was lost that I finally managed to find myself?
Why did we spend so long growing up only to part ways?
And if my soul has fallen away, why does it still follow my skeleton?
Where is the child I still carry within me, or is he gone?"
Neruda

... transforms in the heart of language
Pasolini

... the conscience that does not forgive
I seem to feel hatred, yet I write verses full of precise love.
Pasolini

The outer world of the inner world
or
the inner world of the inner world of the outer world
and the entanglements
like being entangled
when I exist only outside and inside
everything happens within me
inextricably
unravelable
are the entanglements
inside and outside
what is
is
what
is (...).
W. Schulz

Römischer Schlaf I was awarded the 1986/87 Composition Prize by the City of Stuttgart

Klaus Ospald, born in Münster in 1956, initially studied composition with Jürgen Ulrich at the Detmold University of Music, then from 1979 to 1986 with Bertold Hummel at the Würzburg University of Music, where he graduated in 1986 with a Master’s diploma and has since taught music theory and aural training. In 1985 he received a scholarship at the Cité des Arts in Paris, and in 1987 he undertook further studies with Helmut Lachenmann.

Ospald has received, among others, the Promotion Prize of the State Capital of Stuttgart, the State Prize of the Free State of Bavaria and the XXIIIrd Premio Leonardo da Vinci. World premieres of his works have taken place at, among others, the Darmstadt Summer Courses, the Donaueschingen Music Festival, the Steirischer Herbst in Graz and the Munich Biennale.

When one engages with Klaus Ospald’s music, one quickly perceives its great expressiveness. This impression arises not only because many of his compositions set texts to music, integrate them or are inspired by them – the spectrum here is very broad, even if the at least occasional preference for subversive-sarcastic poems (such as those by Konrad Bayer), which are developed into virtuoso vocal feats, is evident. Rather, the frequent embedding of text or textual fragments within instrumental lines (causing them, in the literal sense, to begin speaking and to participate in a discourse of whatever form) provides a clue to the driving forces behind the distinctive rhythmic patterns and the expressive gesture of the pitch contours in his music: It is this same gesture and intensity that lend Ospald’s purely instrumental music its plasticity and convey to the listener the impression that something quite linguistically comprehensible is being communicated to them. Alongside the rhythm, which may at times appear as the dominant element—experiencing many states between the poles of near-stagnation and driven haste, and often lending the course of the compositions a certain theatrical quality—it is the specific timbre and colouring of the temporal progression that frequently reinforces the semantic impression. In his most recent works, these components seem to be in even greater balance, and above all, the exploration of the elementary in sound – extending to states for which Gustav Mahler’s term ‘Naturlaut’ would be appropriate – appears to be given even more scope.