Tell them I've had a wonderful life
African Suite No. 27
For recorder and piano
Score and one part
First movement: The Very First Journey
Second movement: This One Moment
Third movement: The New Year
"Tell them I had a wonderful life" were supposedly the last words of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who really did live an extraordinary life. Born in 1898 in Vienna, the son of a wealthy industrialist family, he later worked as an architect, laboratory assistant, engineer, gardener, nurse and elementary school teacher and, at the age of 50, he became Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge.
With his inheritance he was able to support poets such as Georg Trakl and Reiner Maria Rilke, with the rest going to his siblings. Wittgenstein also played the clarinet, constructed aircraft engines and medical equipment, and besides all this he founded two of the main philosophical schools of the 20th century (the Logical Positivism and the Analytical Language Philosophy). I feel that the most we can ask for, is to live life to the full, like Wittgenstein.
This atmosphere of happiness also characterizes this piece, my 27th African Suite. The first movement The very first Journey describes the inexpressible excitement about the very first journey you experience as a child - for me it was the journey with my mother to the Mondsee in Austria in 1971. I was four years old and learned to swim there - an incredible feeling of freedom.
The second movement This one Moment is about a special moment in your life that touches your soul and captivates your heart, a moment you never forget, a moment of perfect happiness - for me it was the birth of my first daughter on a sunny spring morning in 1998.
The third movement The New Year is all about the fireworks and the exuberant mood at the transition to the New Year, that unbridled anarchic celebration, the carefree bang and crackle, and the seemingly infinite space of freedom that lies before us (Kierkegaard speaks of the "passion of possibility").
Ebba-Maria Künning-Zeijl and me recorded the second movement for a Youtube video on the occasion of the 22nd birthday of my daughter:
https://youtu.be/blrYmSaaEro
Hamburg, May 2019
(Translation: Josee Beeson)