The content and formal design are subjectively derived from the stepped poem. The frequently appearing short motifs of the two parts are based on the parable of the glass bead game in "magical formulaic writing", which in the ring becomes a game with colourful beads, a game with symbols.
Magic and dream, departure and lamentation, farewell and transfiguration are the moods that often follow one another in rapid succession - underneath the thirst for life and the longing for suffering and fulfilment.
The work is dedicated to Julius Berger.

Bertold Hummel

The perfect fifth as a step symbol appears at the beginning and end of the work. Diminished and augmented fifths as variants or veils.
In the first part, various episodes develop from small germ cells, which are strung together in an evolutionary manner.
In the second part, a 4-note sequence determines the movement gesture. In the golden section, this sequence forms into a BACH quotation, which metamorphically influences the conclusion of the work.

Bertold Hummel (This text was sketched in pencil by the composer, but was not made available as an introductory text!)

"The deeply combinatory, poetic aspects . . . of modern music have their origin mostly in Bach," Schumann wrote to a friend in 1840. It applies to Beethoven's music, his own of course, Liszt's and Wagner's . . . all the way to Bertold Hummel, to whose two-movement poem it could even refer specifically. This poem for solo cello and 13 strings is a large-scale homage to Bach, a piece that is based on these famous four notes, which in themselves represent a third of the twelve-tone scale, or in other words: in two further sequences make up the chromatic total. - I don't know whether Hummel had Liszt's 2nd Ballade in mind, which tells a similar "story" with the same four notes, I mean a purely musical one: through the "undergrowth" of chromaticism to the clarifying B-A-C-H, which Hummel also saves until the 2nd movement: Bar 149 in the solo cello is still a little hidden until he quotes the note names exactly, always already unmistakably in bar 184 (the 2nd movement has a total of 301 bars; then the listener has the proportion). After all, the "golden section" would be at 186 bars! Schumann immediately comes to mind when one recognises the "fanfares" of his 2nd Symphony in the very first cello notes of the 1st movement, and as is well known, it is full of BACH. And then it continues with d-c sharp-a-g sharp. Anyone who doesn't realise it . . . But as I said, there is still a "story" to tell, of course - and this is very important - a purely music-immanent one: of thematic organisation, development and repetition. And everything with the "deep combinatorics". "The main thing remains whether the music is something in itself without text and explanation, and especially whether it has an inherent spirit." This is also from Schumann. - The listener will be amazed and confirm that the requirement here is fulfilled in an interesting, captivating, fascinating way and with all musical means, those of the concerto and the symphonic language. The composition was probably written for the Bach Year 1985. The movements were written in August and October 1984.

Friedhelm Onkelbach (in the programme for a performance with Jan Vogler and the Dresdner Kammerorchester under Manfred Scherzer at the Berliner Schauspielhaus on 4 May 1988)

I have been asked to read out the poem "Steps" by Hesse. It reads:

As every blossom withers and every youth
Gives way to age, every stage of life blossoms,
Blooms every wisdom and every virtue
In its time and must not last forever.
The heart must be ready at every call of life
To be ready for parting and new beginnings,
In order to be brave and without mourning
Into other, new bonds to give.
And there is a magic in every beginning,
That protects us and helps us to live.
We should walk cheerfully through room after room,
Clinging to none as to a home,
The spirit of the world does not want to bind and confine us,
It wants to lift us step by step, to widen us.
No sooner are we at home in a circle of life
And cosily acclimatised, we are threatened with slackening,
Only those who are ready to set out and travel,
May break free from paralysing habituation.
Perhaps even the hour of death
Send us young towards new spaces,
Life's call to us will never end...
Well then, heart, take your leave and be well!

Two aspects in particular come to mind when listening to Hummel's composition. On the one hand, there is what Hesse described with the concept of awakening, and then there is what the last sentences of the poem refer to when it says: perhaps the hour of death will also send us young towards new spaces. These new spaces are represented at the end of the second movement - "Poem" consists of two movements - by mixtures of pure triads, which are continued in counter-movement, bitonally. These sounds seem gilded, indeed I am tempted to say "transfigured". The solo cello rises in great calm to the highest heights of the instrument, a pale C in the string orchestra, to which the cello adds a pure lower fourth, acts like a signal, metaphorically speaking like a gateway to those spaces. The awakening, i.e. the realisation of one's own personality, which takes place in stages, is depicted in the first movement. It sounds very impressive, for example, when the soloist's notes echo in the string orchestra in the first bars, placing the individual in an artificial (sound) space.
I recently re-read the "Glass Bead Game" and have summarised the essential sentences about the awakening for you. They are:

That the "awakening" has to mean a respective realisation of himself and of the place where he stood within the (...) human order in general is to be assumed, but the accent seems to us to shift more and more to self-knowledge, in the sense that (he) from the "beginning of the awakening" approached more and more a sense of his special, unique position and destiny, (...)

For me, the second quote is even a kind of quintessence of the entire "Glass Bead Game":
(...) even if there was no unauthorised transcendence, but only a turning of the room around the person standing in its centre, the virtues still existed and retained their value and their magic, they consisted in saying yes instead of denying, in obeying instead of evading and perhaps also a little in the fact that one acted and thought in this way, that one acted and thought as if one were master and active, that one accepted life and self-deception, this reflection with the appearance of self-determination and responsibility, without scrutiny, that for unknown reasons one was basically created more for doing than for recognising, more instinctive than spiritual. (...)

And the last quote reads:
'Awakening', it seemed, was not about truth and cognition, but about reality and its experience and existence. In awakening one did not penetrate closer to the core of things, to the truth, one only grasped, realised or suffered the attitude of one's own ego to the current state of things. One did not find laws, but resolutions; one did not become the centre of the world, but the centre of oneself. That is why what one experienced was so difficult to communicate, so strangely removed from saying and formulating; communications from this area of life did not seem to be part of the purpose of language.

Claus Kühnl (in an impromptu speech at the concert on 30 January 1995 on the occasion of Bertold Hummel's 70th birthday at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich)