The Making of Das Verlöschen

It started with a refusal. I had written a song that ended on its dominant — the chord that, by three hundred years of habit, promises a resolution — and then I simply did not write the resolution. The song stopped where it wanted to keep going. I played it back a dozen times and could not decide whether it was broken or finished. It was finished. That withheld cadence became the whole of Das Verlöschen.

The cycle is a typology of failing lights. A votive candle. A wick burning low. A miner’s lamp going out far underground. Foxfire over a marsh. The bioluminescence of a stranded jellyfish. The green flash at the edge of the sea. Fourteen ways for a light to die, and behind all of them a single four-note figure — what I have come to call the lamp motif — that is lit in the first bar of Votive and is heard, for the last time, as its own shadow in the final bar of the closing song.

I wanted the cycle to be one object, not an anthology. So the motif is everywhere, but rarely on the surface: inverted at the emotional centre, in The Lamp I Kept for You; ground down into a chaconne bass in Variations on a Dying Flame; screaming at the one moment the cycle raises its voice, in The Pilot Light. I have mapped every appearance on a separate page, for anyone who wants to follow the thread.

And the keys descend. The cycle opens in a luminous E major and falls, song by song, to a final B-flat minor — with one warm flat-side oasis at its centre and one last major-key blaze before the dark closes in. You are not meant to notice the descent while it happens. You are meant to arrive at the end and realise you have been falling the whole time.

The texts are mine, and you can read them — original German with facing translation — on each song’s page, or all together in the reading view.