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In this fashion Grünewald, silently wielding his paintbrush, rendered the scream, the wailing, the gurgling and the shrieking of a pathological spectacle to which he and his art, as he must have known, themselves belong. --W.G. Sebald
“Michael Hersch’s music can be ‘an open wound’,” says violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja. “Everything is crystal clear, there is no decoration, no superficial beauty, no compromises.” Indeed, one might consider Hersch’s work as following in the tradition of composers like Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Luigi Nono, Galina Ustvolskaya, and others who, through their music, have expressed their horror at man’s seemingly infinite capacity for cruelty. Simply consider the writers Hersch draws on for inspiration – Thomas Hardy, Ezra Pound, Osip Mandelstam, and Czesław Miłosz, for example – to sense his profound sympathy for those who suffer. Hersch has said that when he reads something that resonates with him, his reaction can be so visceral and immediate that the words themselves may appear “like fire on the page.” Not surprisingly, then, many of his instrumental works are intimately connected with poetry. His own description of the wreckage of flowers for violin and piano (after Miłosz) as “a shattered song cycle without words” could very well characterize the vast majority of his output, including the three works that make up sew me into a shroud of leaves. Of the various poets who have set flame to Hersch’s creativity, Christopher Middleton holds a special place. They met in 2001 as fellows at the American Academy in Berlin, and felt an immediate spiritual kinship. Within a year, inspired by Middleton’s verses, Hersch had begun a three-hour, 50-movement work for solo piano that in its vast scope was unlike anything he’d yet written. And while there are other concert-length works for the instrument in the repertoire, in terms of dramatic range and emotional force, The Vanishing Pavilions is sui generis. It took